If all goes to plan, nearly two years from now, Bradford Girls’ Grammar School will open as a free school.

While waiting to see headteacher Kathryn Matthews and chairman of governors Neil Shaw, I was given short tour by a dalmatian.

It was Children In Need day and the school’s president, 18-year-old Sophia Greenwood, was dressed accordingly. In her spotty outfit she showed me the sports hall, the cafe, the recording studio, the library and much else. We passed witches, Teletubbies and at least one sixth-former whose skin was green.

A good many of the classrooms were empty, with chairs on desks. I put that down to fundraising activities. The target was £1,100 – £19 more than the £1,081 collected last year. But my assumption was wrong, as I soon discovered from Mr Shaw and Mrs Matthews.

She said: “The recession has been biting deeper and our perception is it is biting deeper for our parents; people have less money to spend on education.”

The prospect of change may not please some parents who got their offspring into this high-achieving education establishment, with annual fees of between £8,000 and £12,000, perhaps to avoid the democratisation that being an independent maintained state school is likely to bring.

“There is going to be opposition. But Dixons City Academy delivers high-quality outcomes with children from across a range of ability and income groups,” Bradford’s education chief, Councillor Ralph Berry, had told me before I went to the school. He should know, his eldest son was a Dixons pupil.

Arguably, Bradford Girls’ Grammar has never been exclusive in the public school sense of being excluding. Among its pupils are a number on bursaries. There are two age groups girls and boys from four to 11, and girls only from 11 to 18. Full capacity for both schools is 960.

Mrs Matthews, headteacher since 2009, said: “If it happens, we are going to be able to offer parents in Bradford more choice.”

Mr Shaw said: “The removal of assisted places led to a significant reduction in pupils. That was the time a lot more boys’ schools went co-educational.” Including his own, Bradford Boys Grammar, now Bradford Grammar School.

“The majority of parents, the vast majority of parents, are enormously supportive,” said Mrs Matthews. “We have some with more questions to ask and a tiny minority are not keen.”

But Coun Berry and senior education officers at City Hall are very keen, not for ideological reasons either.

“Bradford needs two more high schools because of rising rolls projected over the next four to five years. We had 1,800 additional pupils last year. We still have another 2,000 places to find for 11 to 16s,” said Coun Berry.

“Bradford Girls’ Grammar is a good school with fantastic facilities. More to the point, it’s in an area where we need high school places. We hope they will meet our need and have closer co-operation with the wider education system in Bradford.”

If the application to the Department of Education is successful the younger school will remain co-educational and be called Ladyroyd School, losing ‘Preparatory’ from its name. The main school will remain for girls only and retain its current name, Mrs Matthews said.

“It’s a planned expansion, over five to seven years. It will be the same school but with a different funding model,” Mr Shaw said.

Sixth-form student Sophia Greenwood had told me that her father was all for the school changing its status, and wished it had happened sooner.

She herself was all for it, saying that the school, with its 17 acres of grounds and buildings, had a lot to offer a wider constituency of people – including a swimming pool, tennis courts, a floodlit all-weather pitch for hockey, a sixth-form building and a marvellous glass-roofed all-purpose courtyard.

In the hall, prepartions were under way for next month’s production of Willy Russell’s play Blood Brothers, which Sophia wanted to be in but missed the auditions.

At the end of the year she leaves the place that has been her second home since the age of three. After a gap year she hopes to go to King’s College, London, to study medicine although her dream, she says, is psychiatry.

She readily admits that the confidence she has in herself owes much to the school’s educational standards and pastoral care.

* Blood Brothers runs from December 1 to 3, starting at 7pm.