After completing her O levels, roughly equivalent to graduating from high school, she picked up passable French while enrolled at the Institut Alpin Videmanette, a Swiss finishing school, now defunct, famous for educating another notable pupil, Diana Spencer, on etiquette and manners.
Maurice Peston was an outstanding exception, as a stream of his more notable former pupils will testify, not least David ("Danny") Blanchflower, a sometime member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, and now a professor at Dartmouth College in the US, and Gerard Lyons, currently enjoying the challenging role of being economic adviser to the mayor of London.
Notable recent pupils include the actors Daniel Radcliffe from Harry Potter movies, Skandar Keynes, of The Chronicles of Narnia film series, and Harry Michell of Tom Brown's Schooldays and Feather Boy.
Former pupils notable for their military careers are Neville Duke, a World War Two fighter pilot; Donald Hodge, one of the last surviving veterans of the First World War, and Terence Lewin, former Chief of the Defence Staff and Admiral of the Fleet.
It was Gove who in October 2010 decided to axe the £162m-a-year dedicated funding for the School Sports Partnerships – local networks of schools and PE teachers – which had quietly been achieving notable success in getting pupils across England to be more physically active during school hours.
Of his hundred pupils the most notable were Timotheus, the Athenian general, prominent in Athens' history between 378 and 355; Nicocles, the ruler of Salamis in Cyprus; and the two greatest Greek historians of the 4th century, Ephorus who wrote a universal history and Theopompus who wrote the history of Philip II of Macedon.
It spawned a number of parodies, with one notable example being this effort from pupils at Eton.
The 2011/2012 data show notable increases in the number of pupils, enrolment rates, number and qualifications of teachers, formal schools and gender parity.
In the classrooms it was as it ever was — with the notable difference (from my grade-school days, at least) that the pupils are expected to provide the class with much of its supplies.
