Kingston Grammar School

Kingston Grammar School was founded in 1561 by the royal charter of Elizabeth I as a Tudor grammar school in the royal borough of Kingston upon Thames — the town where Anglo-Saxon kings were crowned, including Athelstan, the first king of all England, in 925 AD. The school has operated continuously on the same central Kingston site for 465 years and stands on land adjoining All Saints' Church and the historic market square. The Headmaster is Stephen Lehec.

The school became co-educational in 1976 — one of the earlier HMC boys' grammar schools to admit girls — and today educates around 914 pupils ages 11-18. It is a member of the HMC and is inspected by the ISI. The school's central urban location and Royal Borough of Kingston setting produce a strongly London-feeder profile — substantial numbers of pupils progress annually to Imperial, UCL, LSE and Oxbridge.

Kingston Grammar's particular contemporary strength is hockey: the school maintains one of the very top schoolboy hockey programmes in the United Kingdom, with multiple Old Kingstonians having played for GB hockey at Olympic and World Cup level. The school's hockey teams are regular winners of the National Schools Hockey Tournament.

Historically the school's most famous alumnus is Eadweard Muybridge — the Victorian photographer (born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston in 1830, Anglicising his name to the Saxon form Eadweard after a trip to Texas) whose 1878 commission from Leland Stanford to settle the question of whether all four hooves of a galloping horse leave the ground simultaneously produced the first photographic proof of equine locomotion. Muybridge's subsequent zoopraxiscope work — successive photographs of animals and humans in motion projected at speed — was one of the principal precursor technologies to the cinema. The motion-picture frame rate, the persistence of vision and the science of locomotion-capture all derive in part from Muybridge's nineteenth-century work.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme intended to maintain the Tudor royal-foundation principle of free grammar-school education for the boys and girls of Kingston regardless of family means.