Clifton College

Clifton College was founded in 1862 by the Bristol mercer and educational reformer John Percival, who became the school's first Headmaster (and was later Bishop of Hereford). From its first day Clifton was an unusual public school: Percival made it a deliberate policy to emphasise the sciences and mathematics over the classical curriculum that dominated most contemporary public schools, and to admit day boys on equal footing with boarders. Polack's House — opened in 1878 and active until 2005 — was the only dedicated Jewish boarding house at any major English public school, a striking break from the religious uniformity of Victorian education. Clifton is one of the original 26 English public schools as defined in the 1889 Public Schools Yearbook and was the first of the traditional boys' public schools to become fully co-educational, admitting girls to every year group in 1987.

The school today educates around 1,171 pupils across the Upper School (ages 13-18), Clifton College Preparatory School ("the Pre", ages 8-13) and Butcombe Pre-Prep (3-8). The Head of College since 2023 is Tim Greene. The school is a member of the HMC, the BSA and IAPS.

Clifton's alumni list is extraordinary for the proportion of Nobel laureates it has produced. Four Old Cliftonians have won Nobel Prizes: Sir John Kendrew (Chemistry, 1962, for the structure of myoglobin); Sir Nevill Mott (Physics, 1977, for the electronic structure of disordered solids); Sir John Hicks (Economics, 1972, for general equilibrium theory); and most recently Geoffrey Hinton, the "godfather of artificial intelligence," who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational work on neural networks. Hinton attended Clifton in the 1950s before reading experimental psychology at Cambridge.

Beyond science, the school's alumni include Sir Roger Bannister, the medical student who in May 1954 became the first man to run a sub-four-minute mile; the actor Sir Michael Redgrave, founder of the Redgrave acting dynasty; the poet Sir Henry Newbolt, whose Vitaï Lampada ("play up! play up! and play the game!") was written about Clifton cricket and became a defining text of Edwardian schoolboy culture; the Edwardian double international R. E. Foster, who scored a Test innings of 287 against Australia and captained both England football and cricket; and Field Marshal Earl Haig, the British commander on the Western Front in World War I.

During the Second World War the buildings were used as the headquarters of the US First Army under General Omar Bradley, who planned aspects of the Normandy landings from the Clifton campus. The school's playing fields at Beggars Bush were temporarily converted to an airfield. Clifton operates a substantial bursary programme via the Cliftonian Society and remains one of the most distinctive of the original 26 English public schools.