Exeter School

Exeter School was founded in 1633 by the Royalist lawyer and serjeant-at-law Sir John Maynard, who endowed the school in the Devon cathedral city of Exeter to provide education for the boys of the West Country. The school operated continuously through the Civil War (Maynard himself prosecuted the regicides of Charles I at the Restoration), the Commonwealth and the Restoration, and survived various refoundings to emerge in its present form on a 25-acre urban campus at Heavitree on the eastern edge of Exeter. The Head is Louise Simpson. The school became co-educational in 1997 after more than three and a half centuries as a boys' school. It now educates around 956 pupils ages 7-18 across an integrated Junior and Senior School.

The school is a member of the HMC and is inspected by the ISI. Exeter School's academic profile is strongest in the sciences, mathematics and modern languages, with a particularly strong medical-schools pipeline reflecting the proximity of the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital and the University of Exeter Medical School. The school also maintains a strong Royal Navy / Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth pipeline — Dartmouth is roughly thirty miles south of the school.

Exeter School's most internationally significant alumnus is the Victorian geologist Sir Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology (1830-33) established uniformitarianism — the principle that the geological present is the key to the past — as the foundation of modern earth science. Lyell was Charles Darwin's principal scientific mentor: it was Lyell's Principles, which Darwin took with him on the Beagle voyage, that gave Darwin the deep-time geological framework necessary for the theory of natural selection. Lyell later persuaded Darwin to publish the joint Darwin-Wallace papers of 1858.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme intended to provide access for West Country families regardless of family means, maintaining the founder's seventeenth-century Devon educational intent.