King Henry VIII School

King Henry VIII School in Coventry was founded in 1545 by John Hales, a Tudor lawyer and Lord Mayor's apprentice, with funds from the dissolved Whitefriars and Greyfriars monasteries of Coventry — a royal grant under Henry VIII's commission for the redirection of monastic property to charitable and educational uses following the Dissolution. The school takes its name from the king whose Dissolution endowed it. It is one of the oldest schools in the West Midlands and was a Tudor grammar-school foundation of unusual scale, originally educating around 60 boys.

The school operates today on a central Coventry campus and became co-educational in 1976. In 2024 King Henry VIII School merged with the neighbouring Bablake School to form the Coventry School Foundation, retaining both historic school identities and campuses. The Headmaster is Joel Worrall. The school today educates around 813 pupils ages 3-18 across an integrated Junior and Senior School. The school is a member of the HMC and is inspected by the ISI.

The school's most internationally significant alumnus is Sir Frank Whittle OM CBE — the British engineer who designed the world's first practical turbojet engine, patented in 1930 and first flown in the Gloster E.28/39 prototype on 15 May 1941 at RAF Cranwell. Whittle's jet engine ushered in the jet age and forms the technological foundation of modern commercial aviation and military fighter aircraft. Whittle attended King Henry VIII School in the early 1920s before joining the RAF as an apprentice in 1923. His jet-engine work at RAF Cranwell and at Power Jets Limited (the company he founded in 1936 to develop the engine) was conducted under conditions of substantial difficulty — the Air Ministry was sceptical of jet propulsion throughout the 1930s and Whittle's work was insufficiently funded. The 1941 success of the E.28/39 prototype only narrowly preceded the German Heinkel He 178 (1939), and Frank Whittle's jet engine designs ultimately came to dominate the post-war jet-engine industry through Rolls-Royce.

The journalist Phillip Knightley — leading member of the Sunday Times Insight team that produced the canonical investigative journalism of the 1960s-70s, and author of The First Casualty (1975), the canonical history of war journalism — was a King Henry VIII School boy. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Coventry School Foundation.