Best London Prep Schools 2025: Where Their Leavers Actually Go

Every September a parent asks me the same question: “Which prep gets the most pupils into [insert top senior school]?” The honest answer is that the question is wrong twice over. First, because most prep schools aren't actually trying to optimise for one specific senior — they're trying to find the right senior school for each child. Second, because the “destinations” advertised on prep school websites are filtered through years of marketing polish before they ever reach you.

This guide is built from the published leavers' data each prep actually puts on its own website. Where a prep doesn't publish per-pupil counts (as is common in London), we say so plainly rather than guessing. You can verify everything we cite by clicking through to the source on each prep's detail page on School Path AI's Pathways view.

Why “London” matters less than you think

In practice, “London prep” means three quite different things — and they have meaningfully different senior-school markets:

• Boys' prep schools at 13+ entry — Sussex House, Westminster Cathedral Choir School, Westminster Under, Hill House. These prepare for the traditional 13+ entry routes (Eton, Westminster, St Paul's, Winchester, Harrow). Application timelines start as early as Year 5; pre-tests sit in Year 7.
• Co-ed and girls' prep schools at 11+ — Notting Hill Prep, Thomas's Battersea, Garden House, Pembridge Hall, Bute House. These overwhelmingly feed 11+ entry to selective day schools (St Paul's Girls', North London Collegiate, City of London School for Girls, Wycombe Abbey, Godolphin and Latymer).
• King's House and similar “3+ to 13+” preps — a smaller group that hold pupils to 13+ even though they sit in central London. Their destinations split between London day schools and traditional boarding schools.

The first decision is which lane you're in. The data only makes sense once that's settled.

Verified per-pupil counts: the short list

Of the London preps in our database, three publish full per-pupil leavers' tables — meaning we can say with confidence how many pupils actually went to each senior school over a recent multi-year window:

Hill House School (Knightsbridge, mixed)

Aggregated over recent multi-year leavers, Hill House's verified per-school counts include St Paul's School (14 pupils), Eton College (9), Downe House (6), King's College School Wimbledon (5), Winchester College (4), and Charterhouse, Harrow, Worth, Tonbridge, Stowe, Wellington, Benenden, St Mary's Ascot, Wycombe Abbey, Sevenoaks, Bradfield, Uppingham, Marlborough, Millfield, Oundle, Lancing, and St Paul's Girls' — among others.

The interesting feature is the breadth: 24 verified destinations for 13+ leavers, with a top three (St Paul's, Eton, Downe House) that suggests Hill House neither boards-pipelines its boys nor funnels them into a single London day school. It is, in other words, doing what a good prep should — placing each child where they'll thrive.

Notting Hill Prep (Notting Hill, co-ed)

2024–2025 figures published by NHP show 196 senior-school applications progressing to interview, with 163 resulting in offers and 13 scholarships across the cohort. NHP runs both 11+ and 13+ deferred entry, with the dual structure visible in the verified destination list:

• 11+ exits: Francis Holland (Regent's Park), City of London, Highgate, Godolphin & Latymer, Ibstock Place.
• 13+ deferred: St Paul's, King's College School Wimbledon, Brighton College, Marlborough, Wellington, Harrow, St Edward's Oxford, Bradfield, Bedales — plus the highly selective Latymer Upper, UCS, Westminster, and Radley mentioned as offer destinations.

NHP's data quality is unusual in the sector: not just a list of names but a year-on-year application-to-offer ratio you can verify.

King's House School (Richmond, boys)

King's House publishes a clean per-year table. A recent year showed: Reed's School (5 pupils), St Paul's School (5), Charterhouse (1), Eton College (1), Cranleigh (1), Harrow (1), Radley (1), Westminster (1), Winchester (1), Emanuel (1), Epsom (1), Kingston Grammar (1).

At the cohort scale (~20 leavers per year for King's House boys), this is enough to compute meaningful probabilities, although the year-on-year variance will be large. Use the data to understand the shape of the pipeline (concentrated on Reed's and St Paul's, with one-off exits to most other top schools) — not to predict where any individual pupil will end up.

The London preps that don't publish per-pupil counts

Several prominent preps publish only a list of senior schools their leavers go to, not the counts. This is a deliberate choice — and a defensible one for small cohorts where year-on-year variance would give misleading impressions. But it makes data-driven comparison impossible. Examples in our database:

• Sussex House — full destination list, no per-school counts.
• Garden House — full list.
• Pembridge Hall — selected schools mentioned in school literature.
• Bute House — high-level statement only.
• Glendower — partial information.

Don't treat the absence of per-pupil counts as a negative signal. The Westminster Cathedral Choir School and Westminster Under outcomes are well documented privately even though they don't publish per-school numbers.

Three patterns the data reveals

1 · “Top feeder to Eton” is no longer one school

Looking at our verified prep → senior data, the top traditional 13+ boys' preps still place pupils at Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Westminster — but no single London prep dominates any of those seniors' intakes anymore. The market has fragmented across 8–12 feeder preps for each top senior school. Choose a prep for fit, not for the false promise of a guaranteed pipeline.

2 · 11+ leavers cluster on London day schools, 13+ on boarding

Our verified prep destinations show a clean split: 11+ leavers from co-ed London preps overwhelmingly go to selective London day schools (St Paul's Girls', City of London, Highgate, Godolphin & Latymer, NLCS). 13+ leavers from traditional preps skew towards boarding (Eton, Harrow, Marlborough, Wellington, Charterhouse). If your child's “destination shape” matters, choose a prep that routinely produces it.

3 · The strongest signal is breadth, not depth

Hill House sends pupils to 24 different senior schools. NHP to over 20. Both are sometimes critiqued for not having a “dominant feeder”. The data suggests the opposite — these are the preps most actively matching child to school. A list with 90% concentrated on one senior is rarely a good sign for individual fit, even when that senior is famous.

How to use this list

1. On School Path AI's Pathways, select the prep school you're considering. The Top Pathways panel reads out P(university | prep) end-to-end, with a coverage badge so you know how much of the picture is verified.
2. Read the data-quality dot on each pathway card: green = high (≥3 verified rows + ≥25 captured pupils/yr); blue = medium; amber = thin data, no rate displayed.
3. Visit. Numbers narrow the shortlist; visiting confirms the fit. The school's Year 6 head will tell you in 20 minutes what the numbers don't.

What we don't claim

We can't tell you which prep is “best” — that depends on your child, your address, your priorities. What we can tell you is which preps publish enough data to answer the question you'd sensibly want to ask: given a child like mine ended up at this prep, where do similar children end up next?

Read our methodology on School Path AI's Methodology page for the chain-rule probability formula and coverage gating, and see our data sources page for confidence labels and what each one means.