St Benedict's School

St Benedict's School, Ealing, is the largest Roman Catholic Benedictine co-educational independent school in London, founded in 1902 as a small school within the newly established Ealing Priory (now Ealing Abbey) in West London. The Priory was a daughter house of Downside Abbey in Somerset and the school was originally for boys only. It was renamed from the original Benedictine Priory School to St Benedict's School in 1948 and became co-educational in 2008. Today the school educates around 1,185 pupils aged 3-18 across an integrated Junior School (with the Benedictine houses named Bede, Fisher, Gregory and More) and a Senior School (with houses Barlow, Gervase, Pickering and Roberts).

The school is a member of the HMC, the CISC and ISI. The Headmaster of the Senior School is Joe Smith; the Head of the Junior School is Robert Simmons. The school's Patron is Chris Patten, Lord Patten of Barnes, formerly Governor of Hong Kong and currently Chancellor of the University of Oxford. The campus, on Eaton Rise in central Ealing, sits beside the Grade II listed Ealing Abbey church.

St Benedict's most internationally recognised alumnus is Peter Ackroyd, the biographer, novelist and critic. Ackroyd's London: The Biography is among the defining works of late-twentieth-century English non-fiction; his novel Hawksmoor won the Whitbread Award and the Goncourt Award; his earlier The Great Fire of London and his life of T. S. Eliot established his reputation. He won the Somerset Maugham Award for his early work and has twice won the Whitbread (now Costa) Prize. Other St Benedict's alumni include the Marxist literary theorist Christopher Caudwell (real name Christopher St John Sprigg), whose Illusion and Reality remains influential in Marxist aesthetics; the EastEnders actor Paul Bradley (Nigel Bates); the architectural historian Patrick Baty; and the Cambridge medieval historian Peter Biller.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme intended to provide Catholic boys and girls of Ealing and West London families educational access regardless of family means, maintaining the Benedictine tradition of monastic-school hospitality.