Crofton House School

The short version

The short version

Crofton House School is an all-girls independent day school founded in 1898, teaching Junior Kindergarten to Grade 12 on a 10-acre campus on West 41st Avenue in Kerrisdale.

It runs the BC curriculum enriched and accelerated, with Advanced Placement courses in the senior years, and it is one of the city’s oldest educational institutions — a school that predates most of the neighbourhood around it.↗↗

For a relocating family, the practical summary is this: Crofton is the girls’ counterpart to St. George’s — same west-side tier, similar era, no boarding.

Its 2026-27 tuition of CAD 35,300 sits below most peers at headline level, but the fee page contains two charges arriving families must understand: a CAD 5,000 entrance fee, and a CAD 5,000 Independent School Grant Fee that applies when neither parent qualifies the student for BC’s provincial grant.

Read the fees section before you compare headline numbers.

What the school is

From four girls in a parlour to a Kerrisdale institution

Crofton House was founded in 1898 by the Gordon sisters — Jessie Fisher Gordon and Mary Elizabeth Gordon — teaching four girls in the family home on Georgia Street. The school took the ivy leaf of the Gordon clan as its emblem and ‘servabo fidem’ (‘I shall keep faith’) as its motto.

When the sisters retired in 1937, the school became an educational trust — the not-for-profit structure it keeps today — and in 1942 it moved to the present Kerrisdale campus.↗↗

A detail that explains the campus: Crofton was a boarding school until 1990, and the old boarding house survives as the main administrative building, The Old Residence.

Today the school is day-only, about 850 girls, and describes its philosophy as girl-centred education — the conviction that girls thrive when every leadership role, team and lab in the building belongs to them.↗↗

The quality signals are conventional for the tier: CAIS accreditation, ISABC membership, and a historically strong showing in the Fraser Institute’s BC secondary rankings (tied for first in a past report card — a dated and controversial measure we mention for completeness, not endorsement).

The evidence worth more than any ranking is a visit at school-run time.↗

Academics in practice

Enriched BC curriculum with AP — not the IB

Crofton teaches the British Columbia curriculum, enriched and accelerated, culminating in the provincial Dogwood diploma, with Advanced Placement courses across the senior years — calculus, chemistry, computer science, English, European history, French, Mandarin, physics and Spanish among them.

It does not offer the IB Diploma, a deliberate contrast with Mulgrave across the harbour: AP lets a strong student specialize; the IB forces breadth. Know which your daughter needs.↗↗

Tuition buys more inclusion than at many peers: the school’s own fee schedule states that tuition covers textbooks, the Community Dining lunch program, a school-issued iPad or laptop, the annual grade-wide outdoor education excursion, JK-Grade 5 school supplies, and AP exam fees for Crofton-timetabled courses.

When you compare schools, compare what is inside the number, not just the number.↗

The school does not publish a dated university-destination table on its public pages. Ask admissions for the most recent graduating class’s destination list and AP score distributions, and read them against the small cohort sizes typical of a single-form-entry girls’ school.

Admissions and cost

The grant fee, the entrance fee, and the intake years

For 2026-27, tuition is a flat CAD 35,300 across grades (including a CAD 3,000 non-refundable deposit), plus a CAD 5,000 new-student entrance fee due on acceptance.

The Board sets fees each December and the school states plainly that tuition and enrolment fees rise at least 3% a year — model that escalation across a JK-12 career, because it compounds to a very large number.↗

The charge that surprises internationally arriving families: a CAD 5,000 Independent School Grant Fee, applied when neither parent qualifies the student for the provincial grant.

This is the BC funding system made visible — the province pays independent schools 35-50% of the per-student grant only for eligible (broadly, ordinarily resident) students, and Crofton passes the shortfall to families who do not qualify.

Whether you will owe it depends on your immigration and residency status; ask admissions to classify your family in writing before you budget.↗↗

Admissions concentrates on four intake years — JK, SK, Grade 6 and Grade 8 — with application fees of CAD 350 (discounted to CAD 250 for complete Grade 6 and 8 applications by early October).

Third-party admissions guides report roughly 25 JK seats, 15 SK seats, 20-26 Grade 6 seats and about 44 Grade 8 seats; Grade 8 candidates write the SSAT plus Crofton’s own test, and deadlines fall in November of the year before entry. Confirm the current calendar with the school — at this tier, dates move.↗↗

Two more fee-page details worth knowing. The English+ stream — for Grade 8 applicants educated in English whose first language is not English — carries a one-time CAD 40,000 program fee for the five-year program, a serious number to weigh in any offer decision.

And financial assistance for Grade 8 entry can cover up to 98% of the total cost of attending, among the most generous published ceilings in Canadian independent schooling.↗

The family experience

Why pay at all — Crofton against the free public system

British Columbia funds a free public education for every ordinarily resident child, including the children of work-permit holders — and Kerrisdale’s own public secondaries are solid.

The honest case for Crofton’s fees is not survival but specificity: a girls-only environment, classes and programs tuned to it, the inclusive fee structure, and a century of alumnae continuity.

The honest case against is that the public system here is genuinely good, and CAD 40,000 a year buys a great deal of tutoring, travel and university savings instead.

For families who do not yet meet BC’s residency definitions, the calculation is starker: the public board will charge international tuition of its own (around CAD 17,000 at the VSB), while Crofton adds its grant fee on top of tuition. Get your status classified by both systems before comparing — the answer changes the shortlist.

Parent sentiment in public forums tends to praise the community, the all-girls confidence culture and the grounds, with periodic debate about admissions competitiveness at Grade 8 and the cadence of fee increases. Treat it as reported experience.

The questions that matter — how new girls are integrated at each intake, and how the school supports a student who joins mid-stream outside the intake years — are for your visit.

Take these to the school

Questions that move beyond the tour script