King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon

• 1. Introduction

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  King Edward VI School in Stratford-upon-Avon sits on a site that has housed a school since at least the early thirteenth century, making it one of the oldest educational institutions in England. On the first floor of its fifteenth-century Guildhall, in a room still called "Big School," William Shakespeare is believed to have been taught as a boy. That single fact draws visitors and scholars to this Warwickshire grammar school to this day, but Shakespeare is only one thread in a story that stretches from medieval guilds to national esports championships. Who were the other figures shaped by this place? And how did a school re-founded just nine days before a dying king signed its charter survive into the twenty-first century?

• 2. A Medieval Beginning

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  In May 1295, a record appears in the Register of Deacons of the Diocese of Worcester: the ordination of a man named Richard as rector scholarum, charged with teaching boys the alphabet, psalters, and religious rites. That entry is the earliest documented trace of the school's existence, though the Guild of the Holy Cross had been running some form of education on the site since at least the early thirteenth century.

  The school as it formally exists today owes its charter to King Edward VI, who established Stratford-upon-Avon as a borough in June 1553. The terms of that charter included a schoolroom, a schoolhouse, and a payment of twenty pounds per annum for a master. It was a close-run thing: the school was re-founded nine days before the young king died of tuberculosis, making it the last of the King Edward VI Schools. Levi Fox, a former chairman of the governors, later published a history of those early years, preserving the documentary record of this narrow founding window.

  The Guild Chapel, which stands adjacent to the Guildhall, was also founded by the medieval Guild of the Holy Cross. Now owned by the Stratford-upon-Avon Town Trust, it is used by the school each week for morning services, choir rehearsals, and organ lessons, as well as for the annual Nine Lessons and Carols and Remembrance Services.

• 3. Shakespeare's School

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  John Shakespeare, a glover and wool dealer, held the office of bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1568. As a civic officer's son, his boy William would have been entitled to a free place at the school. Scholars believe William attended between the ages of seven and fourteen, though no attendance record survives.

  Among the classmates who may have sat alongside the future playwright were Richard Field, Robert Dibdale, and Thomas Green. Field went on to become a printer and publisher in Elizabethan London, known for his close association with Shakespeare's poems. Dibdale became a Catholic priest and was martyred at Tyburn on the 8th of October 1586; he was declared Blessed by Pope John Paul II on the 22nd of November 1987.

  The ground-floor of the Guildhall, where the town council of Shakespeare's era met and where travelling players performed, still bears the holes in the walls where rods once held a temporary stage. That room served as a school library until February 2013. After restoration work it opened to the general public from eleven in the morning each day. The Guildhall connects to Pedagogue's House across the courtyard, first built in 1427 and believed to be the oldest half-timbered schoolroom in England.

• 4. Builders of the Campus

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  The school's physical fabric tells its own story across six centuries of building. The Guildhall dates from the fifteenth century; a wing housing the Mathematics Department was added in the 1930s; and the Quad itself took shape in the 1960s and 1970s, designed by Stratford architect Robert Harvey.

  Denis Dyson, a physics and astronomy master, arrived at the school in 1926 for what was planned as a six-month stay. He remained until his retirement at the age of 71 in 1975, and continued to assist the school well into his nineties. The Biology and Chemistry building, opened in 2008, carries his name and houses six science laboratories.

  The most recent addition is the Richard Spender Building, a three-storey block opened in 2017 that holds the English Department, computing suites, and the school library. That library is named after Old Edwardian Tim Pigott-Smith, the actor who won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor in 1985 for his role in The Jewel in the Crown. Pigott-Smith died in 2017, the same year the building bearing his classmate's name was opened.

• 5. Houses and Their Namesakes

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  In 1921, headmaster the Revd. A. Cecil Knight established six houses to promote competition among the boys. By 1924 that number had been reduced to four, named Shakespeare, Flower, Warneford, and De La Warr. Charles Flower, a benefactor in the 1890s, and the Earl De La Warr, who served as High Steward of Stratford in the 1850s, gave two of those houses their names.

  A reorganisation in 1973 collapsed the system to just two houses: King's, in blue, and Guild, in gold, recognising the historic patrons of the school. Then in 2000 four houses were re-introduced, each named after a twentieth-century alumnus who had excelled in a distinct field.

  Reginald Warneford, whose name had been attached to one of the original 1924 houses, was an old boy who became the first naval airman to receive the Victoria Cross. He earned it on the 7th of June 1915 at Ghent, Belgium, flying as a Flight Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Navy's 1 Squadron, RNAS. He was killed in a flying accident that same year, 1915. Richard Spender, poet and army officer, was killed assaulting German machine-gun positions in 1943; the Daily Telegraph described him as the Rupert Brooke of the Second World War. Robert Fitzmaurice, who entered the school in 1905, was wounded in the First World War but recovered to build a career as a civil engineer.

• 6. Performance and Competition

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  Perry Mills, former deputy head of the school, founded a theatre group called Edward's Boys that grew out of the school's involvement with Michael Wood's documentary series In Search of Shakespeare. In 2014 the group received an Owle Schreame Award for their production of John Lyly's Galatea. They have since performed twice at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London, as well as at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford, Christ Church Oxford, and the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. A more recent tour took them to Montpellier, France, where they performed at three separate venues including L'Assomption School and the Maison des Choeurs. The Royal Shakespeare Company has also used the school's Levi Fox Hall for a production of Julius Caesar.

  In 2017 the school formed a competitive gaming team called the Scorpions. Two years later, in 2019, the Scorpions won the National Esports Tournament in Overwatch, beating entries from 3,500 secondary schools across the country. They followed that by winning the British Esports Association's Open National Tournament held at the Insomnia gaming festival.

  On the rugby pitch, the school won the Daily Mail Cup in 1991 and has reached the semi-finals and quarter-finals on subsequent occasions. The rugby programme has toured internationally, including a trip to Japan in 2024. The school's band has performed at the 100 Club on Oxford Street in London, a venue with its own long musical history.

• 7. Recognition and Alumni

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  In 2020, The Sunday Times named King Edward VI School State Secondary School of the Decade, citing sustained academic performance over ten years. A separate analysis based on five years of Ofsted Parent View data found the school to be among the joint-happiest secondary schools in England, with 99 per cent of parents saying their child was happy there.

  The school's alumni span more than seven centuries of English public life. John de Stratford, who died in 1348, served as Archbishop of Canterbury and held the offices of both Treasurer and Chancellor of England. His brother Robert de Stratford, who died on the 9th of April 1362, was one of Edward III's principal ministers.

  In the twentieth century, General Richard Nelson Gale commanded the 6th Airborne Division during the invasion of Normandy and Operation Tonga in 1944, and had earlier been awarded the Military Cross in 1918. Alex Henshaw, who had been an air-racing pilot in the 1930s, served as chief production test pilot for the Supermarine Spitfire at the Vickers-Armstrongs plant at Castle Bromwich during the Second World War. More recently, James Roe won gold at the London 2012 Summer Paralympics as part of the mixed coxed rowing team, having also won at the World Rowing Championships in 2011. Esme Booth, born in 1998, claimed an Olympic silver medal at the Paris 2024 Games and gold at the European Rowing Championships, becoming the school's most recent Olympian.