The funding for a full revenue bursary lasts for seven years. To take the next step and fund a bursary forever, we rely on an endowment - an amount of money that we've invested to generate income as well as capital growth.

St Paul's has given me confidence and the ambition to strive for things I would have hardly dared to dream about.

The endowment currently stands at £6 million, which provides enough income to make a St Paul's education available to ten more girls. It takes £450,000 to endow a full bursary in perpetuity and £225,000 to endow a half bursary – but any size of contribution to the endowment fund will help and there are many ways to give.

By comparison with older and better-endowed schools and universities, which have much larger endowment funds, we've only started to build up ours relatively recently. One duty of the St Paul's governors is to appoint investment managers and review their performance carefully, so that we can be sure we're getting the most out of donations.