Oakham School

Oakham School was founded in 1584 by Robert Johnson, the Archdeacon of Leicester, together with the parallel foundation at Uppingham seven miles to the south — making the two schools the twin Tudor grammar-school foundations of Rutland, England's smallest county. The schools share Johnson as their founder and the Robert Johnson Foundation as their endowing trust. Oakham sits at the centre of the historic Rutland market town of Oakham and has operated continuously on the same site for 442 years. The Headmaster is Henry Price.

The school became co-educational in 1971 — one of the very first HMC boys' boarding schools in England to admit girls — and is now fully co-educational, with around 908 pupils ages 10-18 and a substantial boarding population. The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association. Oakham was an early adopter of the International Baccalaureate Diploma, offering it alongside A-Levels since 2000, which has produced a strong international university pipeline.

The school's most internationally celebrated alumnus is Matthew Pinsent CBE — four-time Olympic gold medallist in rowing (Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Athens 2004), the rowing partner of Sir Steve Redgrave for three of those four golds, and one of only a handful of athletes in any sport to win gold at four consecutive Olympic Games. Pinsent's rowing career began at Oakham, where the school's geographic position adjacent to Rutland Water — the largest reservoir in the United Kingdom — provides exceptional rowing facilities for a non-Thames school.

The cricketer Stuart Broad OBE — the England Test bowler whose 604 wickets across 167 Tests place him second only to James Anderson among English Test wicket-takers, and whose 8-15 to dismiss Australia at Trent Bridge in 2015 is one of the most famous Test spells of all time — was an Old Oakhamian. The entrepreneur and conservationist Tim Smit KBE, the co-founder of the Eden Project in Cornwall, was a pupil. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Robert Johnson Foundation.