Abingdon School

Abingdon School is one of the oldest schools in Britain. Its foundation date is uncertain — some scholars believe it was established before the twelfth century by the Benedictine monks of Abingdon Abbey, with a legal document of 1100 listing "Richard the Pedagogue" as the first headmaster. The earliest unambiguous reference to the school in surviving records is from 1256, when its endowment was confirmed; it was re-endowed in 1563 in the post-Reformation reorganisation under royal charter. By any of these reckonings Abingdon is the twentieth oldest independent school in Britain. The school is located in Abingdon-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, around six miles south of Oxford city centre, and educates around 1,266 pupils. In May 2024 the school announced that it would transition from being a boys-only foundation to full co-education by 2030. The Headmaster is Michael Windsor.

Academically Abingdon's geographic proximity to the University of Oxford produces a particularly strong Oxford feeder relationship: a meaningful proportion of each sixth-form cohort wins offers to Oxford colleges. The school's sciences and mathematics are particularly strong; alumni include Sir John Mason, the Met Office Director and a foundational atmospheric physicist, and the Royal Society Fellow Thomas Linacre — the personal physician to Henry VII and Henry VIII and founder of the Royal College of Physicians.

Abingdon's most famous late-twentieth-century alumni are, unusually, an entire rock band. All five members of Radiohead — Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Philip Selway — met as Abingdon pupils in the 1980s, formed the band there under the name "On a Friday," and went on to record OK Computer, Kid A, In Rainbows and a body of work widely regarded among the most important in late-twentieth-century rock music. Jonny Greenwood has subsequently built a parallel Oscar-nominated career as a film composer (There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread, The Master).

The actor Tom Hollander, recently of The White Lotus, is also an Old Abingdonian, as is Sir Peter Williams CBE, the former Master of St Catherine's College, Cambridge and chairman of Oxford Instruments. Abingdon operates a substantial bursary programme and remains one of the strongest day-and-boarding HMC schools in the Thames Valley.