Woodstock Rd, Oxford, OX2 7NN
St Edward’s School was founded in 1863 by the Reverend Thomas Chamberlain, Senior Student and Honorary Canon of Christ Church Oxford and at the time was the Vicar at St. Thomas the Martyr in Oxford.
The school’s early intentions were to primarily educate the sons of middle class clergy and to emphasise the teachings of the Anglican faith as its core priority. The school grew slowly up to the Great War with additions to school facilities as needed and often funded under critical financial parameters.
Sport was always important and from its earliest days formidable teams played the earliest forms of rugby football, as well as cricket and later rowed on the adjacent canal. Today, every conceivable form of sporting activity is partaken in within a highly competitive fixture list against peer schools, both in this country and abroad.
The school has acquired a formidable reputation for war heroes going back to the Boer War but it was in the Second World War and the R.A.F. in particular, that the names of Guy Gibson, Douglas Bader, Adrian Warburton, Arthur Banks, Alec Cranswick and others raised the school’s profile to national fame.
After the Second World War, the School grew ever upwards and outwards and in 1982 welcomed the first girl students into the Sixth Form, followed fifteen years later by full co-educational status. Currently there are about 695 pupils at the School. Eighty-five percent of pupils board, and the girl/boy split is 40%/60%; 15% of pupils are from overseas.