Wellington East Girls' College is on the lower slopes of Mount Victoria. It was built on reserve land bordering Wellington College in 1925, to cope with the demand for female education in Wellington at the time. By the end of the First World War, there were over 800 pupils at Wellington Girls’ High School (now Wellington Girls' College) in Thorndon, so a new school was founded on the other side of the city.
The College primarily serves families of the eastern and southern suburbs and inner city Wellington. However, it also has students from all over Wellington, the Hutt Valley and Porirua City. With International students, Wellington East Girls is a truly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic community in a very cosmopolitan city which values diversity.
The Wellington East Girls' College Mission Statement says the college educates young women academically, physically, socially and aesthetically in a co-operative atmosphere, so that each may realise her full potential and face the future with confidence in whatever role she chooses.
Ethnicities of Students are:
- European/Pakeha 57%
- Māori 9%
- Samoan 8%
- Indian 7%
- Chinese 5%
- African 3%
- Other Asian 3%
- Other European 3%
- Other Pacific Island 2%
- Other ethnic groups 3%
It shares with Wellington College the administration of the Gifford Observatory.
The architecture of the original building is interwar stripped classical. The grand main building has a Category I listing in the New Zealand Historic Places Trust Register.
The school's longtime principal Janice Campbell retired at the end of Term 1 2007, and has been replaced by Sally Haughton.
Famous quotes containing the words wellington, east and/or college:
“When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte,
As every child can tell,
The House of Peers, throughout the war,
Did nothing in particular,
And did it very well:”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
why American men think that success is everything
when they know that eighty percent of them are not
going to succeed more than to just keep going and why
if they are not why do they not keep on being
interested in the things that interested them when
they were college men and why American men different
from English men do not get more interesting as they
get older.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)