A tradition dating back almost 450 years is set to be broken as Bradford Grammar School has announced it will admit girls for the first time to the main school.

Girls will be able to take the entrance exam in January and from next September will be slipping on the distinctive brown and grey uniform.

"It's an historic change for us," said headteacher Stephen Davidson.

"It's a new Millennium and new opportunities and it's all coming together very well - this year is the 450th anniversary of our foundation. Next year we will have been 50 years on this site and by 2000 we will have girls at the school."

There are already a handful of girls in the sixth form where they have been admitted for a few years, but they only number 37 out of a total school roll of 1,070.

School registrar Penny Brown admitted some parents were resistant when the idea was first mooted.

But the amount of positive interest generated from parents who want to send their daughters to the school - where fees vary between £1,350 and £1,700 per term - has outweighed the negative.

Mrs Brown said: "Nobody has threatened to take their son out of the school, although one prospective parent at an open day said they would not send their son if we admitted girls."

Mrs Brown, who has two sons at the school, is convinced that, if anything, standards will improve as boys will have to compete against girls in the entrance exams.

Bradford Grammar School is one of the top performing independent schools in the region with consistently excellent GCSE and A-level grades.

The Independent Schools Information Service placed it at 190 out of 600 private schools nationwide for its GCSE results which saw 97 per cent of pupils attain grades A to C.

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