Grey, Maria Georgina (1816-1906)

English pioneer of women's education. She helped to found the National Union for Promoting the Higher Education of Women (1871), which created the Girls' Public Day School Company (later Trust) in 1872 to establish ‘good and cheap Day Schools for Girls of all classes above those attending the Public Elementary Schools’. The trust eventually had some 38 schools which set new academic standards for girls' education.

With her sister Emily Shirreff she also revived interest in the work of the German educationist Friedrich Froebel, founder of the first kindergarten (1836), and promoted the Froebel Society; Croydon, one of the trust's first schools, had a kindergarten. The Women's Educational Union opened a training college for teachers in higher grade girls' schools in 1878, later called Maria Grey College.

Grey also published a novel and works on women's enfranchisement and education.