Bristol Grammar School

Bristol Grammar School (BGS) was founded in 1532 by the brothers Robert and Nicholas Thorne, prominent Bristol merchants, under licence from the Mayor and Aldermen and confirmed by royal charter. The original school was located in the disused chapel of St Bartholomew's Hospital in central Bristol; in 1879 it relocated to its present site adjacent to the University of Bristol on Tyndall's Park. BGS is a member of the HMC, has been co-educational since 1980, and today educates around 1,389 pupils aged 4-18 across the Infant School, Junior School, Senior School and Sixth Form.

The school sits at the academic centre of Bristol and consistently ranks among the strongest independent schools in the South West. Its sixth-form A-Level performance has placed Bristol Grammar among the top quintile of HMC schools by Oxbridge offer numbers in recent years. The Headmaster since 2017 is Jaideep Barot, previously Director of Studies at Trinity College, Cambridge.

BGS's most influential twentieth-century alumnus is Sir John Pople, who shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry — the theoretical framework underpinning most modern molecular modelling. The school's other defining alumnus is Sir Allen Lane, who founded Penguin Books in 1935 and effectively created the modern paperback industry; his decision to sell sixpenny paperbacks at Woolworths transformed mass-market reading in Britain.

In public life, Oliver Franks, Baron Franks — British Ambassador to the United States during the formative early years of the Cold War — was an Old Bristolian. Bristol Grammar has also produced an unusual concentration of senior English judges: three current Lord Justices of Appeal (Sirs Rabinder Singh, Mark Warby and Timothy Holroyde) are all Old Bristolians. The comedian and actor Russell Brand was also a pupil at the school in the 1990s, before his expulsion at 16. Bristol Grammar operates a substantial bursary programme and remains one of the academically strongest South West independent schools.