St Edward’s School was founded in 1863 at New Inn Hall Street in central Oxford by the Rev Thomas Chamberlain, a fellow of Christ Church and Vicar of St Thomas’s Church, near Oxford railway station.
It was one of a number of schools founded by Chamberlain, a passionate adherent of the Oxford Movement, the great Anglo-Catholic revival of the middle of the 19th century, but the only one to survive.
It was soon realised that the school could not grow and expand on its central Oxford site, and in 1873 moved to the current site on Woodstock Road .
The school was to grow under the leadership of Algernon Barrington Simeon, whose dream was to construct a collection of monastic-style buildings around a central quad, the second largest quad in Oxford after Christ Church.
The First World War had a profound impact, and the school is proud that more boys pro rata went to serve their country than any other independent school in the country. The names of those who gave their lives are recorded and commemorated on the walls of the chapel.
The Second World War also had a huge impact on the school, with four RAF heroes being former pupils.
In 1982 the first girl joined the school in the lower sixth and the school became fully co-educational in 1997. Currently there are about 660 pupils in the school, of whom two thirds are boys and about 80 per cent are boarders.
St Edward’s offers a wide range of qualifications: GCSE, IGCSE (the international GCSE, offered in core subjects), A-levels , the Extended Project and the International Baccalaureate Diploma; exam results in recent years have been the best in the school’s history.
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