Birkenhead School

Birkenhead School was founded in 1860 by William Jacobson, Bishop of Chester, as a boys' grammar school on the Wirral Peninsula on the south side of the River Mersey, across the water from Liverpool. The school sits on a 25-acre campus in the Birkenhead suburb of Prenton and is one of the principal independent schools of the Wirral and Merseyside region. Birkenhead became co-educational in 2000 and today educates around 955 pupils ages 3-18. The Headmaster is Paul Vicars. The school is a member of the HMC and is inspected by the ISI.

The school's most internationally significant alumnus is David Owen, Baron Owen of Plymouth — Labour Foreign Secretary from 1977 to 1979 (the youngest British Foreign Secretary of the twentieth century, appointed at 38), and one of the four founding figures of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) when it broke away from Labour in 1981 (the "Gang of Four" of Owen, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers). Owen led the SDP through the mid-1980s and was its principal advocate for the eventual merger with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats — though Owen himself refused to join the merged party and continued briefly with a rump SDP into the early 1990s. He was created a life peer in 1992 as Baron Owen and remains a significant elder statesman of British politics. Owen attended Birkenhead in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before reading medicine at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

The school's academic profile is strong across the sciences, mathematics, modern languages and politics, with a particularly strong feeder relationship to the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester reflecting the Mersey geographic position, alongside the standard Oxbridge and Russell Group pipeline. The school operates a substantial bursary programme intended to provide educational access for Wirral and Merseyside families regardless of family means.