Bradford Grammar School

Bradford Grammar School (BGS) was founded in 1548, in the early years of Edward VI's reign, as a free grammar school for the boys of the West Yorkshire town of Bradford. The school has occupied several sites in Bradford across its 478-year history and now sits at Frizinghall, north-west of the Bradford city centre. BGS is co-educational, ages 4-18, with around 1,055 pupils. Entrance is by examination and the school offers means-tested bursaries to support fees. The Headmaster is Simon Hinchliffe. The school is a member of the HMC.

BGS's most internationally famous alumnus is the composer Frederick Delius, one of the leading English composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Delius — the son of a German-born Bradford wool merchant — attended BGS in the 1870s before working in his father's wool business and then emigrating, first to Florida and later to France, where he composed Brigg Fair, A Mass of Life, Sea Drift and the orchestral nocturne Walk to the Paradise Garden. His Bradford origins and the Yorkshire folk tunes that he absorbed in childhood remained an important influence on his mature music.

In science, Sir Edward Mellanby KCB FRS, the nutritional biochemist who in 1919-22 discovered vitamin D and established that rickets — the bone-deforming disease then endemic among industrial-city children — could be prevented by a fat-soluble vitamin present in cod-liver oil, was educated at Bradford Grammar. Mellanby's discovery has been described as one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the twentieth century and underpins all subsequent vitamin-D research.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme intended to maintain the 1548 foundation principle of providing educational access for the boys and girls of West Yorkshire regardless of family means.