Bancroft's School

Bancroft's School was founded in 1737 under the will of Francis Bancroft, a wealthy City of London marshal who died in 1727 and left his fortune to the Worshipful Company of Drapers — one of the twelve Great Livery Companies of London — for the establishment of an almshouse and school in the City to educate twenty-four boys, sons of orphaned or impoverished London craftsmen. Bancroft's particular request to the Drapers was that the school should be built around an enormous tomb in which he would be permanently visible, encased in glass, to the schoolchildren — a request the Drapers honoured for over a century until the school relocated.

The school operated in central London for over a hundred and fifty years before relocating in 1889 to its present 25-acre site at Woodford Green on the Essex/London border. The Bancroft tomb was moved with the school and stands today on display at Woodford Green. The school is co-educational ages 7-18 — it was one of the very first HMC boys' schools to admit girls, in 1973 — with around 873 pupils. The Headmaster is Simon Marshall.

The school is a member of the HMC and is governed by the Worshipful Company of Drapers. The school is inspected by the ISI. A-Level results place Bancroft's consistently in the top quintile of UK independent day schools by Oxbridge offer numbers.

Bancroft's most internationally significant alumnus is Sir Frederic Bartlett — the Cambridge experimental psychologist whose Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932) introduced the concept of "schema" to cognitive psychology and established Bartlett as one of the founding figures of the modern discipline. Bartlett held the Cambridge Chair of Experimental Psychology from 1931 to 1952. In contemporary politics, Andy Burnham — the current Mayor of Greater Manchester, former Labour Health Secretary, twice-defeated Labour leadership contender and one of the leading figures of the contemporary Labour Party — was a Bancroft's boy. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Worshipful Company of Drapers.