St Peter's School, York

St Peter's School, York, is reputedly the third-oldest school in the world. It was founded in AD 627 by St Paulinus of York, the Roman missionary bishop sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the kingdom of Northumbria. Paulinus established the school in the grounds of the original York Minster, alongside the cathedral foundation, and Alcuin of York — the great Anglo-Saxon scholar who became master of the school in the mid-eighth century and later tutor to Charlemagne at his court at Aachen — is sometimes regarded as the school's most distinguished early alumnus. The school operated continuously in the Minster's grounds until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when in 1540 it was re-endowed and relocated to its present site north of the city, near St Mary's Abbey.

St Peter's today is a co-educational HMC day and boarding school of around 1,000 pupils aged 2-19, organised across St Peter's Pre-Prep (St Olave's), St Peter's Junior School and the main Senior School. The Headmaster is Jeremy Walker. The school is also part of the York Boarding Schools Group.

The school's alumni list traverses fourteen centuries of English history. Among the early-medieval scholars: Alcuin of York, who as Charlemagne's tutor and educational reformer co-created the Carolingian Renaissance. From the early-modern period: Guy Fawkes, the Catholic conspirator whose 1605 attempt to blow up Parliament gave Britain its annual bonfire night. From the modern period: the Oscar and Grammy-winning film composer John Barry OBE, who wrote the soundtracks to eleven James Bond films and won Academy Awards for Out of Africa, Born Free, Dances with Wolves and The Lion in Winter; the former Director-General of the BBC and Chair of the Football Association Sir Greg Dyke; the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, who served as Master of Balliol College, Oxford; and the historian and management theorist C. Northcote Parkinson, after whom Parkinson's Law is named.

Other Old Peterites include the Poet Laureate Laurence Eusden (the first to receive the annual pension established by the Stuart court); Sir Clifford Allbutt FRS, who coined the term sphygmomanometer; and a long line of Bishops of York. The school is unusual in maintaining its claim to the world's third-oldest continuous foundation alongside a modern academic and pastoral programme that places it consistently in the top tier of Yorkshire independent schools.