Sherborne School

Sherborne School is one of the oldest schools in the world. It was founded in AD 705 by St Aldhelm, the Bishop of Sherborne and later sainted abbot of Malmesbury, as a school for the cathedral choristers and the boys of the Saxon kingdom of Wessex. The school has operated on the same site beside Sherborne Abbey, in the Dorset town of Sherborne, for over 1,300 years — making it one of the very oldest surviving educational institutions anywhere in Europe. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, the school was re-endowed by King Edward VI in 1550 and reformulated as a free grammar school for the boys of Sherborne and the surrounding Dorset countryside. It remains today a boys-only full-boarding school, ages 13-18.

Sherborne is a member of the HMC, the BSA and the Rugby Group of British independent schools. The Headmaster is Dr Dominic Luckett. The school operates alongside Sherborne Girls, a separate but historically linked girls' boarding school in the same town, with which it shares some sixth-form provision.

Sherborne School's most internationally famous alumnus is Alan Turing OBE FRS — the founding figure of computer science, the cryptographer whose work at Bletchley Park led to the breaking of the German Enigma cipher and shortened the Second World War by an estimated two to four years, and the theoretician whose 1936 paper on computable numbers introduced the Universal Turing Machine. Turing attended Sherborne from 1926 to 1931. His arrival is recorded in school legend: a General Strike began on the day Turing was due to start at Sherborne, and the thirteen-year-old cycled 62 miles from Southampton to Sherborne alone over two days to arrive at his first day of school. The school has subsequently established the Alan Turing Centre to honour his memory.

In literature, Sherborne educated the novelists John Cowper Powys (A Glastonbury Romance; Wolf Solent) and his brother T. F. Powys, and the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis (1968-72) — the father of the actor Sir Daniel Day-Lewis. In athletics, Sir Christopher Chataway — who acted as Roger Bannister's pace-maker in the first sub-four-minute mile at Iffley Road in May 1954 and went on to a career as a Conservative politician and broadcaster — was an Old Shirburnian. In law: Sir Patrick Hodge, Deputy President of the UK Supreme Court. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Sherborne School Foundation.