Millfield School

Millfield School is the largest co-educational boarding school in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1935 by R. J. O. "Jack" Meyer, an Oxford-educated former Indian Civil Service officer who arrived back in England determined to establish a school that would educate "the whole child" with sport, the arts and academics given equal weight. The school grew rapidly through the post-war period and is today located on a 240-acre rural campus in Street, Somerset, with an associated Preparatory School at Edgarley Hall and the Pre-Prep at Millfield Lower School. It educates around 1,240 pupils aged 2-18, of whom over 990 are full boarders representing approximately 75 nationalities.

Millfield is a member of the HMC, the BSA and ISI. It offers both A-Levels and the International Baccalaureate Diploma in the sixth form. The Headmaster since 2018 is Gavin Horgan, previously of King's Bruton.

The school's defining characteristic is its sporting programme — one of the most extensive at any school in the world. Millfield maintains professional-standard facilities for athletics, swimming (50-metre Olympic pool), cricket (nineteen first-team pitches), rugby, hockey, equestrianism (full cross-country course and dressage arenas), tennis, golf and water sports. The school's coaching staff includes international-level coaches in most major sports. Sir Gareth Edwards, the Welsh international widely considered one of the greatest rugby players in the sport's history, attended Millfield, as did the double Olympic gold-medal rower Helen Glover MBE; the French Open and Australian Open tennis champion Mary Pierce; the England women's cricket captain Anya Shrubsole; and the paralympic equestrian gold medallist Sophie Christiansen.

In the arts, the composer Lord Lloyd-Webber — creator of The Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar — attended Millfield briefly before transferring to Westminster, and several recent Olivier and Tony Award-winning theatre alumni have come through the school. Millfield Development and the Millfield Foundation operate a substantial scholarship and bursary programme; the school is unusually committed to sport scholarships at the international competitive level, and a meaningful proportion of leavers each year proceed to NCAA US universities on athletic scholarships.