Rossall School

Rossall School was founded in 1844 by the Reverend St Vincent Beechey as a Church of England boys' boarding school on the Fylde Coast of Lancashire, with direct beach frontage on the Irish Sea. The school's 160-acre coastal campus at Fleetwood is one of the most beautifully sited boarding schools in England, with the school buildings looking directly out across the sea to the Isle of Man on clear days. Rossall became co-educational in 1976 and today educates around 829 pupils with a substantial boarding population. The Head is Jeremy Quartermain.

The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association and is one of the substantial number of UK boarding schools to offer the IB Diploma alongside A-Levels. The Rossall campus's distinctive coastal location has shaped a strong sailing and water-sports programme alongside the traditional boarding-school co-curricular activities. The school maintains an unusual claim in the history of association sport: Rossall is one of the schools (with Eton and Harrow) that contributed to the codification of modern field hockey in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the Rossall version of the game being one of the principal forms incorporated into the 1875 Hockey Association rules.

The school's most internationally significant alumnus is Sir Thomas Beecham — the conductor whose career as one of the most influential British classical-music figures of the twentieth century included founding the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (1946), the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1932) and the Beecham Opera Company (later English National Opera). Beecham was the leading British advocate of the music of Frederick Delius (whose entire catalogue Beecham recorded with the RPO in the 1940s and 50s), Sibelius and Richard Strauss, and his Mozart and Haydn recordings remained reference performances for half a century. Beecham was the heir to the Beecham's Pills pharmaceutical fortune, which funded much of his early orchestral career.

The writer Leslie Charteris — creator of Simon Templar, "The Saint", protagonist of the long-running series of crime novels and short stories that ran from 1928 and produced 50+ books and the 1962-69 ITV series with Roger Moore — was an Old Rossallian. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Rossall Foundation.