St Albans School

St Albans School is one of the oldest continuously operating schools in the English-speaking world, founded around 948 AD as the monastic school of St Albans Abbey — the Benedictine monastery built over the shrine of St Alban, the first English Christian martyr, who was executed by the Romans c. 304 AD on the hill above the present cathedral. The school's continuous educational lineage runs unbroken from the medieval monastic school through the Dissolution of the Monasteries (when Henry VIII's commissioners closed the abbey but preserved the school), through the Elizabethan refoundation, and through the centuries since.

The school sits today immediately adjacent to St Albans Cathedral — Britain's oldest place of continuous Christian worship and the principal cathedral of the Anglican Diocese of St Albans. The school occupies the medieval Lady Chapel and Gateway of the Abbey, both Grade I listed buildings. Boys are educated in Years 7-11 only; the Sixth Form (Years 12-13) is co-educational. Around 887 pupils, ages 7-18, attend. The Headmaster is Jonathan Gillespie.

The school is a member of the HMC and the Cathedral Schools Association. It is inspected by the ISI. A-Level results place St Albans consistently in the top quintile of UK independent schools by Oxbridge offer numbers — a reflection of both the school's academic standards and its long cathedral-school feeder relationship to Cambridge.

The school's most internationally significant alumnus is Stephen Hawking CH CBE FRS — the theoretical physicist whose A Brief History of Time (1988) is the best-selling popular-science book in publishing history and whose technical work on black-hole thermodynamics, Hawking radiation and the no-boundary proposal made him among the most cited physicists of the late twentieth century. Hawking held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (the chair once held by Newton and Dirac) for thirty years. He attended St Albans from 1952 to 1962, where his school friends included the future BBC radio physicist Michael Church and the future Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Tim Brewer.

Nicholas Breakspear — the only English Pope, who reigned as Pope Adrian IV from 1154 to 1159 and crowned Frederick Barbarossa Holy Roman Emperor — is traditionally said to have been educated in the medieval St Albans Abbey school. Sir Robin Day, the legendary BBC political interviewer who hosted Question Time and Newsnight and conducted some of the most famous broadcast interviews in British political history, was a St Albans boy. The Victorian architect and horologist Edmund Beckett, 1st Baron Grimthorpe — the designer of the Big Ben clock mechanism at the Palace of Westminster — was an Old Albanian.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the St Albans Cathedral Foundation, intended to preserve the Saxon monastic-school principle of educational access for the boys and girls of Hertfordshire regardless of family means.