St Paul's School

St Paul's School was founded in 1509 by John Colet, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral and a leading English Christian humanist of his generation. Colet endowed the school with the explicit intent of educating 153 boys in grammar, rhetoric and the classical languages, and entrusted the foundation to the Worshipful Company of Mercers — who govern the school to this day. St Paul's is one of the original nine Clarendon Schools defined by the Public Schools Act 1868 (it successfully argued before the Clarendon Commission that it was a private rather than a public foundation and was therefore omitted from the Act, alongside Merchant Taylors').

The school today occupies a 43-acre site on the south bank of the Thames in Barnes, south-west London, having moved there in 1968 from West Kensington. It is selective at 13+ and 16+, predominantly a day school with around thirty boarding places. Sally-Anne Huang has been High Master since 2020, the first woman to hold that office in the school's 500-year history. The chairman of governors is Johnny Robertson.

Academic provision sits at the very top of the English independent system: A-Level results and Oxbridge offer numbers place St Paul's consistently alongside Eton, Winchester and Westminster as one of the country's three or four strongest senior schools by university outcomes. The Mercers' Company-funded bursary programme — Pauline Bursaries — supports a significant portion of the school's pupils.

The roll of Old Paulines spans the central history of English public life since the Renaissance. From letters: John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost; Samuel Pepys, the diarist and Secretary of the Admiralty; G. K. Chesterton, the journalist and creator of Father Brown; Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, the political philosopher. From science and exploration: Edmond Halley, after whom the comet is named; Sir Sydney Camm, designer of the Hawker Hurricane. From statecraft and arms: John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough; the Marquess Curzon, Viceroy of India; Field Marshal Montgomery, the Allied commander in Normandy and the Western Desert; and Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the last Viceroy. From modern public life: the former Chancellor George Osborne; Robert, Baron Winston, the fertility pioneer and broadcaster; and the BAFTA-winning actor Damian Lewis (Band of Brothers, Homeland).