Lauriston Girls' School

The school has a rural campus for its year 9 students, known as 'Howqua', near the town of Mansfield in the Victorian high country.[8] Attendance is compulsory for all year 9 students, with the girls spending the whole school year on the campus as full-time boarders. It is similar to Timbertop, run by Geelong Grammar School, but students generally take part in a wider range of outdoor activities. Students at Howqua participate in activities such as downhill and cross-country skiing, horse riding, solo camping, hiking, rafting, rock climbing and other outdoor recreational activities, culminating the year with a 6-day hike through Victoria's mountainous regions. Students also participate in a community service rotation during the winter term, which involves activities such as building tracks, planting trees, gardening, visiting residential homes, acting as assistant teachers in rural schools, and running their own radio station.

There are 10 houses, each able to hold 12 girls although generally holding 10. These houses are Hollyer, Gillespie, Thompson, O'Brien, Fitz-Gibbon, Wirringga, Arthur-Robinson, Cramond, Mirrabooka and Kirkpatrick. Each house has beds, a bathroom, a kitchenette, dining/main area, wardrobe spaces, hike room, drying room and two balconies. The campus also offers a dining hall, a "dungeon" which doubles as a fire shelter, classrooms, Resource centre/library, music rooms, health centre, art centre, dance studio and staff houses. The campus offers running tracks such as the ring road, rainbow track, weir track (a 4  km run), lone pine (originally named Peg Slam J- using the letters of the girls' names who built the track as part of their community service) and more. At the end of each term, a running challenge of 9.4  km is to be run in 1hr, called the Howqua River Road Challenge.

It began in 1993 and in 1997 it became compulsory for students to attend the Howqua campus for the duration of a full school year. Originally students stayed at Howqua for 1 semester only, now it is compulsory for them to stay the whole year.Girls return home once a term on exeats (3 to 5 days) and return home for term holidays, before departing for Howqua again.

The concept of Howqua is to help girls develop emotionally and physically independent of their family in a world without constant technology. Mobile phones and laptops are banned from use at Howqua and internet access is also not allowed. It also aims to forge strong relationships between girls and social skills are greatly developed. All-year-round Howqua girls are urged to push themselves to achieve their goals, strengthening their sense of self-determination. The year leads up to many major end-of-year challenges, including a 17.3  km run from Telephone Box Junction on Mt Stirling to the summit, continuing onwards up Bourke St to the summit of Mt Buller.

In the 2006/2007 summer holidays, bushfires greatly threatened the Howqua Campus. The campus was also very threatened by fires and evacuated for the first time in early 2009.

Lauriston's music program caters for students from Prep to year 12 and offers a number of choral and instrumental ensembles, including bands and orchestras. Annually, there are approximately twenty-five performance occasions, including the 'Annual School Concert', which is held at the Melbourne Recital Centre.

From Years 3 and 4, a compulsory string orchestra group is formed. Violin, viola, cello, and double bass is assigned to them.

Lauriston also stages one musical and one play each year, one for students in years 5 to 8 and another for years 10 to 12. Recent performances include Seussical, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Little Mermaid Jr.

Lauriston offers over 20 sports, which may be played at both competitive and recreational level. The school is an inaugural member of Girls Sport Victoria (GSV), an association of 24 girls schools throughout Melbourne. Through GSV, students in years 7 to 12 may compete at an inter-school level in athletics, basketball, cricket, cross country, diving, golf, hockey, indoor cricket, netball, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis, volleyball, and water polo.[10]

Lauriston has a successful history in rowing. They usually compete in IVs but have occasionally raced a VIII. At the 2010 Head of the Schoolgirls Regatta the Lauriston senior crews won the Div 1 schoolgirl IV, Div 2 schoolgirl IV and Div 3 schoolgirl IV. The first IV were national gold medallists in the Schoolgirl IV in 2010, 2011 and 2013 and won a bronze medal in 2015.