Clubs & Activities

Sports clubs include Athletics, Badminton, Football, Gymnastics, Hockey, Netball, Rounders, Tennis and Volleyball. The school regularly competes in the Leicester City Netball and Badminton Leagues and gymnastic competitions, as well as offering an extensive range of friendly fixtures against local schools. The department has a strong ‘sport for all’ ethos, enabling all girls who wish to take part in active pursuits.

Many girls take part in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award at Bronze, Silver and Gold levels. Year 11 and 12 girls raise money to take part in expeditions abroad. Building a primary school in Selela, Northern Tanzania and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro was our most recent project in 2007. Community work has also been undertaken in Bolivia and Nicaragua.

Debating  is a popular activity which involves many girls, with weekly meetings held for both a junior debating society, Years 7 to 9, and a senior debating society for older girls.  Junior girls have the opportunity to participate in the Rotary Youth Speaks public speaking competition. Senior debating teams have won through to the regional rounds of national competitions and other successes in the past include Year 10 teams regularly winning through to the finals of the International Competition for Young Debaters and senior teams competing in schools’ competitions organised by the ESU, Oxford Union, Cambridge Union and a weekend of debating at Durham University.  Senior students of English have also been successful in getting through to the Great Shakespeare Debate, a two-day event held in Stratford upon Avon.

Girls of all ages raise money for charity by organising fund raising events throughout each academic year. Some of the recent local and national beneficiaries include Leicester Women’s Aid, the National Autistic Society, Children in Need, Jeans for Genes, the Crazy Hats Breast Cancer Appeal and Oxfam. Activities range from break time hot drinks and cake sales, to bigger projects such as the recent Year 7 street-dancing workout which raised money for LEPRA and its work with leprosy victims, or the annual school disco which funds the school’s sponsorship of the Chamassava Workshop school in Mozambique.

Performing Arts at the school are thriving. Specialist teachers give lessons in speech and drama as well as in a variety of musical instruments. The school's musical life includes a variety of different choirs and instrumental ensembles, with many girls participating in the Leicestershire Schools' Orchestra.

In recent years the school’s choirs have been successful in festivals in Hinckley, Leicester, Peterborough and Kettering. There are regular Performing Arts concerts and lunchtime concerts and the school put on a performance of ‘Bugsy Malone’ at the Y theatre in 2006 and will be producing ’The Wizard of Oz’ this year.

Because of the school’s excellent central location in the country, frequent outings are made to both local and national theatrical and musical productions throughout each academic year. Several departments arrange theatre trips to Stratford to see the RSC in action, as well as booking seats at a wide range of local theatres such as Stamford, Nottingham or Birmingham. Theatre companies are also invited into school. Annual visits from well-known writers further enhance the taught curriculum and encourage an impressive number of pupils to enter various local and national young writers competitions each term.

All departments offer a wide range of excursions, field trips, residential courses and day visits to help the girls to extend their classroom learning. Popular trips include the Black Country Museum, a residential at Sherringham, a visit to Denby Potteries, role-playing at the galleries of Justice in Nottingham, a moving visit to the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre and a team-building day at Beaumanor Hall for the Sixth Form students.

Recent trips abroad have included a tour of the Battlefields of Northern France and Belguim, skiing in the French Alps, attendance at a Sixth Form conference held in Paris entitled “Your future in Europe”, and visits to Greece, the Pas de Calais and Valencia.

Leicester High School has a partner school , Gymnasium am Stefansberg, in Merzig, a town in the Saarland, Germany.