King Edward VI School

King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon — colloquially known as "the Stratford Grammar" — has its origins in the thirteenth-century Guild Hall school of Stratford-upon-Avon and was formally re-founded in 1553 by King Edward VI as part of the post-Reformation reorganisation of English chantry schools. The school's current foundation has therefore operated continuously for 472 years; its educational lineage in Stratford stretches back over 700 years. The school is co-educational only in the Sixth Form (Years 12-13); Years 7-11 are boys-only. Today it educates around 872 pupils. The Headmaster is Bennet Carr.

The school is most famous because William Shakespeare — born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language — almost certainly attended it as a boy in the 1570s. Although no school registers survive from Shakespeare's period, it is overwhelmingly accepted by scholars that the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman of Stratford with the entitlement to a free place at the grammar school, was a pupil at what was then the only school in the town. The Tudor schoolroom in which Shakespeare would have been taught — a Grade I listed building on Church Street — still stands and continues in use today as part of the school. The schoolroom can be visited as a museum.

Shakespeare's near-contemporary Richard Field — the printer who published Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), Shakespeare's earliest published works, in his London printshop — was a slightly older pupil at the same school. Another contemporary was Robert Dibdale, a Catholic priest who was martyred at Tyburn in 1586 and beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987. From earlier in the school's history, the brothers John and Robert de Stratford — both educated at the medieval Guild school — became Archbishop of Canterbury (John, 1333-48, also Treasurer and Chancellor of England) and Bishop of Chichester respectively.

The school is a member of the HMC. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the King Edward VI Foundation, intended to maintain the 1553 royal foundation principle of providing educational access for the boys and girls of Warwickshire regardless of family means.