Nottingham High School

Nottingham High School (NHS) was founded in 1513 by Dame Agnes Mellers, the widow of Richard Mellers, a wealthy Nottingham bellfounder, who endowed a free grammar school in the town. The foundation was confirmed by King Henry VIII and the school received its royal charter in the same year. NHS is one of the oldest schools in the East Midlands and has been continuously operating in Nottingham for over five centuries. It moved to its current site on Waverley Mount, near the city centre, in 1868. The school became co-educational in 2015, ending more than 500 years of boys-only education. Today it educates around 1,186 pupils aged 4-18 across the Infant and Junior School and the Senior School. The Headmaster of the Senior School is Andrew Holman; the Head of the Infant and Junior School is Polly Bennett.

NHS is a member of the HMC. The school's most internationally celebrated alumnus is D. H. Lawrence, the novelist and poet whose Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and the long-banned Lady Chatterley's Lover are among the foundational works of English modernism. Lawrence attended NHS as a scholarship boy in the 1890s.

In music, the school has produced two internationally significant Baroque conductors: Christopher Hogwood CBE, who founded the Academy of Ancient Music in 1973 and led the historically informed performance movement in the UK, and Nicholas McGegan, who has served as music director of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in San Francisco for over thirty years. In literature, the contemporary Cambridge English don and bestselling nature-and-travel writer Robert Macfarlane (The Wild Places, Landmarks, Underland) is an Old Nottinghamian.

In early-modern English history the school has its dark connection to the Gunpowder Plot: Henry Garnet, the Jesuit priest who was executed in 1606 for failing to disclose his knowledge of the conspiracy, was a pupil at NHS in the 1560s. In modern public life, alumni include the Westminster Dean Eric Abbott and the Vice-Chancellor of Durham University Frank Byron Jevons. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Old Nottinghamians' Society — continuously active since 1897.