St Albans School

St Albans School stands as a distinguished institution with a rich heritage, offering an exceptional educational experience for boys and girls. Renowned fo...

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.

A School that blends a proud and distinguished history with an unwavering commitment to preparing young people for the future. Our pupils consistently achieve excellent examination results in the most demanding academic subjects, securing places at leading universities. However, we firmly believe that a truly exceptional education encompasses much more than academic success. At St Albans School we nurture intellectual curiosity and foster personal growth, enabling each pupil to flourish both inside and beyond the classroom.

We are delighted that from September 2026 we will be extending our co-educational provision across the whole school. In addition to our thriving co-educational Sixth Form, we will welcome both boys and girls into the First Form (Year 7), ensuring that every bright child can benefit from an outstanding St Albans School education.

Every pupil here is well-known and valued as an individual. Our inspirational teaching, combined with a rich and varied co-curricular programme, provides pupils with a wealth of opportunities to explore their talents. Our pastoral care system ensures that pupils develop the confidence, resilience and self-belief to give of their best in all areas of school life.