Magdalen College School

Magdalen College School (universally abbreviated as "MCS") was founded in 1480 by William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of England, as a grammar school attached to his new foundation of Magdalen College in the University of Oxford. The school was originally established to train the choristers of Magdalen College Chapel — whose May Morning singing from the top of the Magdalen Tower remains one of the most famous English musical traditions — and to provide preparatory grammar-school education for boys intending to proceed to Magdalen College itself. The school sits immediately adjacent to Magdalen College on Cowley Place, on the eastern bank of the River Cherwell, directly opposite the Magdalen Tower.

MCS is co-educational ages 7-18, with around 950 pupils across an integrated Junior School (ages 7-11) and Senior School (ages 11-18). The Master (the title for the head, derived from the medieval magister scholarum) is Helen Pike. The school became co-educational only in 2017 — among the last major HMC boys' schools to do so. The school is a member of the HMC and the Eton Group.

MCS is consistently ranked among the top five UK schools by A-Level results, with one of the highest Oxbridge offer rates of any school in the country — a function partly of the school's six-hundred-year feeder relationship with Magdalen College itself and the geographic immediacy of the University of Oxford literally across the river.

The school's alumni list spans literature, law, architecture and the arts. Oscar Wilde attended the school briefly as a prep boy. Sir John Betjeman, the Poet Laureate from 1972 to 1984 and the great elegist of post-war suburban England (Summoned by Bells, the famous "Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough"), was a MCS boy. The composer and matinée idol Ivor Novello (Keep the Home Fires Burning, The Dancing Years) was educated at the school as a chorister. Lord Denning — the Master of the Rolls from 1962 to 1982 and the most influential English judge of the twentieth century — was a MCS boy.

In modern film, the Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes CBE (American Beauty, Skyfall, the Bond film No Time to Die, 1917) was at MCS. Tim Henman OBE — the former British No. 1 tennis player and four-time Wimbledon semi-finalist — was at MCS. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Magdalen College School Foundation.