King Edward's School, Birmingham

King Edward's School Birmingham — universally abbreviated as "KES" — was founded in 1552 by royal charter of Edward VI as a Tudor grammar school in the medieval Warwickshire town of Birmingham. The school is part of the King Edward VI Foundation, Birmingham — a Tudor charitable foundation that today operates seven schools across Birmingham (King Edward's School for boys, King Edward VI High School for Girls, and five state-grammar King Edward VI schools serving Birmingham). The School operates today on a 50-acre campus in Edgbaston, central Birmingham, immediately adjacent to the University of Birmingham. The Chief Master is Dr Katy Ricks.

KES is boys-only ages 11-18 with around 837 pupils. The school is a member of the HMC and the Eton Group (the informal grouping of leading day schools with St Paul's, Westminster, Merchant Taylors' and Highgate). KES is consistently ranked as one of the very top three UK schools by A-Level results and Oxbridge offer rate — and is consistently the highest-performing non-London independent school by Oxbridge offer rate.

The school's most internationally famous alumnus is John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE — the Oxford philologist whose The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) defined the modern fantasy literature genre and remain among the best-selling novels in any language in history. Tolkien attended KES from 1900 to 1911, where his classical and philological education laid the foundation for his Oxford academic career as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. Tolkien's Tea Club and Barrovian Society — the informal school club of his closest school friends Christopher Wiseman, Robert Quilter Gilson and Geoffrey Bache Smith — was central to Tolkien's intellectual formation; Gilson and Smith both died in the Great War, a loss that shaped Tolkien's subsequent writing.

Field Marshal Sir William Slim, the British 14th Army commander who led the recapture of Burma from the Japanese in 1944-45 (one of the largest land campaigns of the Second World War) and later served as Governor-General of Australia, was a KES boy. The computer scientist Sir Maurice Wilkes — who built EDSAC at Cambridge in 1949, the world's first practical stored-program computer and the founding machine of British computing — was at KES. The Conservative politician Enoch Powell — the brilliant classicist whose Rivers of Blood speech of April 1968 produced one of the defining political crises of the post-war period — was educated at KES.

The Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones — Cophetua and the Beggar Maid and many other late-Pre-Raphaelite canvases — was at KES, where he met William Morris (the two becoming inseparable in their Oxford years and joint founders of the Arts and Crafts movement). The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the King Edward VI Foundation.