Bryanston School

Bryanston School was founded in 1928 in the former Viscount Portman's country house — Bryanston House, designed by the great Victorian architect Richard Norman Shaw and completed in 1894 in the Queen Anne Revival style. The school was founded on the explicit pedagogical model of the Dalton Plan — an American progressive-education model developed by Helen Parkhurst in the 1920s, emphasising individual tutorials with subject teachers, substantial self-directed learning, and an absence of the rigid prefect, fagging and corporal-punishment systems that characterised contemporary English public schools. The Dalton Plan made Bryanston the most progressive of the major English boarding schools of the inter-war period.

The school sits today on a 400-acre rural campus near Blandford Forum, Dorset, with the Grade I listed Norman Shaw Bryanston House as the principal school building. Bryanston became co-educational in 1974 and today educates around 778 pupils with a substantial boarding population. The Head is Richard Jones. The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association.

The school's most internationally significant alumnus is Sir Mark Rylance — three-time Tony Award-winning theatre actor (Jerusalem, Boeing-Boeing, Twelfth Night), the founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe (1995-2005), the BAFTA-winning star of the BBC Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell), and winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Bridge of Spies (2015). Rylance is widely regarded as the great Shakespearean actor of his generation.

The painter Lucian Freud OM CH — grandson of Sigmund Freud, and one of the great portrait painters of the second half of the twentieth century — was a Bryanston pupil from 1939 to 1940 before being expelled (he had set fire to a haystack). The actor Tobias Menzies — Outlander, Game of Thrones, Prince Philip in The Crown — was at Bryanston. The conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner — founder of the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, and one of the most influential period-instrument early-music conductors of the late twentieth century — was a Bryanston boy. The designer Sir Terence Conran — founder of Habitat (1964), founder of the Conran Restaurants group, and the principal British design retail entrepreneur of the late twentieth century — was at Bryanston.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Bryanston Foundation.