The King's School

The King's School, Canterbury, was founded in AD 597 by St Augustine of Canterbury — the Roman missionary monk sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the Anglo-Saxons — alongside Canterbury Cathedral itself. By this reckoning King's is the oldest continuously operating school in the world; only St Peter's School, York (627), and the cathedral schools of Rochester and Wells contest the title within England. The school has occupied the Precincts of Canterbury Cathedral continuously for over 1,400 years.

The King's School today is a co-educational day and boarding school of around 860 pupils aged 13-18, organised into 17 houses spread across the medieval and modern buildings of the Precincts. The Junior King's School (JKS) — originally based in the cathedral crypt and now at Milner Court in Sturry, on a site donated by Lord Milner's widow in 1925 — educates around 400 boys and girls aged 3-13. The Headmaster, since 2022, is Jude Lowson — the first female Head in the school's 1,429-year history. The Chairman of Governors is ex officio the Dean of Canterbury (currently Robert Willis).

The school's alumni roll runs through the central history of English literature, theatre and exploration. Christopher Marlowe — Shakespeare's near-contemporary, author of Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta and Edward II — attended the King's School in the late 1570s on a scholarship and is regularly cited as the school's most influential old boy. W. Somerset Maugham, the novelist and short-story master who wrote Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge and The Painted Veil, was a pupil in the 1880s. Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO OBE — the travel writer (A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water) and Special Operations Executive officer who, with Bill Stanley Moss, abducted the German General Heinrich Kreipe from Crete in April 1944 — attended the school in the late 1920s. The Victorian aesthete and Oxford don Walter Pater was a King's Scholar.

In modern entertainment the school is particularly known for the actor Orlando Bloom — Legolas in The Lord of the Rings, Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean — who attended in the early 1990s before training at Guildhall. The school continues to provide choristers to Canterbury Cathedral and operates a substantial bursary programme through the Friends of King's Canterbury.