RGS Worcester

The Royal Grammar School Worcester (RGSW) is one of the oldest continuously operating schools in the English-speaking world. It was founded in 1291 by Bishop Bosel of Worcester — predating Eton by some 150 years and Westminster by more than 270 — and has occupied its present site on Upper Tything, immediately east of Worcester Cathedral, for most of its modern history. The school holds a royal foundation: a charter was granted by King Henry VIII in 1541 confirming its independent status. It is co-educational, educates around 1,272 pupils across all sections (Junior School, Senior, Sixth Form) and is a member of the HMC. The headmaster is John Pitt.

RGSW's cricket pitch, Flagge Meadow, is used by Worcestershire County Cricket Club for second-XI fixtures and historic first-team matches, and the school has produced multiple Worcestershire and England cricketers — Dean Headley among the most recent. Its most famous twentieth-century alumnus is Imran Khan, the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan (2018-22) and the captain of the Pakistan team that won the 1992 Cricket World Cup; Khan attended RGS Worcester from 1971 to 1972 while preparing for entry to Aitchison College and then to Oxford.

The school's medieval heritage is alive in its older alumni list. Sir Reginald Bray KG, who served Henry VII and is credited with the architectural design of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, was a pupil. So was the 15th-century jurist Sir Thomas Littleton, whose Tenures (printed posthumously by Wynkyn de Worde) was a foundational text of English property law for three centuries. The medieval allegorical poet William Langland (Piers Plowman) is also said to have studied at the school, although the documentary evidence is fragmentary.

In modern public life and the arts: the National Poet of Australia, Adam Lindsay Gordon; the aeronautical engineer Sir George Dowty; the Royal Society of British Sculptors member John McKenna; the international tenor John Mark Ainsley; and the SETI Program Office founding director John Billingham. The Manchester Ship Canal — the largest civil-engineering project of the late Victorian period — was designed by another Old Elizabethan, Sir Edward Leader Williams. The school operates a substantial bursary programme and remains the senior independent school of Worcestershire.