Bablake School

Bablake School was founded in 1344 by Queen Isabella, the widow of Edward II and mother of Edward III, as a chantry school attached to the Collegiate Church of St John the Baptist in Coventry. The school's medieval foundation — a 682-year history — makes it one of the oldest continuously operating English schools, comparable in age with King's School Canterbury, King's School Rochester and St Peter's School York. The school took its name from "Babbelak", the medieval English name for the area of Coventry around the College of St John. The original college was suppressed at the Reformation but the school survived and was re-founded under municipal endowment in 1560.

Bablake operated as a boys-only school for most of its history and became fully co-educational in 1986. Today it educates around 961 pupils ages 7-18. In 2024 Bablake merged with the neighbouring King Henry VIII School to form a single Coventry School Foundation, retaining both historic school names and campuses. The Headmaster is Jeremy Crouch. The school is a member of the HMC and is inspected by the ISI.

The school's most internationally recognised alumnus is Robert Clift OBE, who won Olympic gold with the Great Britain men's hockey team at Seoul 1988 — the team's only Olympic gold in field hockey. In politics, Bill Morris, Baron Morris of Handsworth OJ — the former General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union and one of the first black peers in the House of Lords — was an Old Wheatleyan. The school's name for its alumni, "Old Wheatleyans", derives from Thomas Wheatley, the sixteenth-century Coventry merchant who re-endowed the school in 1560.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Coventry School Foundation, intended to provide educational access for the boys and girls of Coventry and the West Midlands regardless of family means — preserving the 1344 royal foundation principle of free chantry-school education.