Woodhouse Grove School

Woodhouse Grove School was founded in 1812 by Adam Clarke and the Wesleyan Methodist Conference as a boarding school for the sons of Methodist itinerant preachers — pastors who travelled between Wesleyan circuits and could not provide their boys with a settled education. The school's foundation was a defining moment in Methodist education in England; from this Methodist starting point Woodhouse Grove broadened gradually into a general fee-paying school while retaining its non-denominational Methodist Christian identity. The school is co-educational, ages 3-18, with around 1,047 pupils on a 70-acre campus at Apperley Bridge between Bradford and Leeds. The Headmaster is James Lockwood; the Chair of Governors is Alan Wintersgill.

Woodhouse Grove is a member of the HMC and the BSA. The school is known nationally for its sporting programme — particularly rugby and cricket. The school's most internationally famous current sporting alumna is Ellie Kildunne, who won the 2025 Women's Rugby World Cup with England, was runner-up for the 2025 BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and was named World Rugby Women's 15s Player of the Year for 2024. Ellie Kildunne attended Woodhouse Grove from 2011 to 2016. The England men's rugby international Paul Sampson (Wasps and the 2001 British & Irish Lions tour to Australia) is another Old Grovian, as is the Yorkshire and England Test cricketer Ajmal Shahzad. Women's cricketer Kathryn Leng and tennis players Naomi Broady and Katie O'Brien are also alumni.

In nineteenth-century science the school produced the chemist and photographer John William Draper, who in March 1840 took the first detailed photograph of the moon's surface (using a daguerreotype process) and went on to a distinguished American academic career as the founder of the New York University School of Medicine; and George Northcroft, one of the founders of modern orthodontics. The Victorian illustrator and museum curator John Lockwood Kipling — father of Rudyard Kipling and curator of the Lahore Museum (whose Wonder House Rudyard later made the setting of Kim) — was educated at Woodhouse Grove. The school operates a substantial bursary programme.