Bloxham School

Bloxham School, also called All Saints' School, is a private co-educational day and boarding school of the British public school tradition, located in the village of Bloxham, three miles (5 km) from the town of Banbury in Oxfordshire, England. The present school was founded in 1860 by Philip Reginald Egerton and has since become a member of the Woodard Corporation. The current headmaster is Paul Sanderson, who took over from Mark Allbrook in 2013. The school has approximately 560 pupils with a maximum current capacity of 600.

The school is affiliated with Woodard Schools, as only the governors/governing body is fully responsible for the school's performance, but hold responsibility to the Woodard Board. On Woodard Schools website it is listed under "Woodard Incorporated Schools (independent)".

Founded as a school of the Oxford Movement, Bloxham is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference.

The original school on the site in the north of the village of Bloxham was founded in 1853 by John William Hewett (1824–1886), a local Anglo-Catholic curate. The school was supported by Samuel Wilberforce, who commissioned the diocesan architect, George Edmund Street, to draw up plans for the new school buildings. Street's design was described by The Gentleman's Magazine as the 'most beautiful modern Gothic buildings ever devoted in England to a scholastic purpose'. The foundation stone was blessed by Wilberforce on 7 June 1855. Hewett's plans were for a school for 100 commoners, 40 scholars and an unspecified number of choristers. In February 1855, a trust for the school was established, naming it All Saints' Grammar School, with the intent of providing for 'the liberal education of the sons of the clergy, gentry, Naval, Military and professional men and others'. Hewett contributed his extensive library and the bulk of the funds for the ambitious building project. By mid-1856, Hewett was bankrupt, and the school had failed to attract sufficient numbers of boys, who were expected to pay unusually high fees. Hewett's school, with several dozen pupils and incomplete buildings, was closed in April 1857. The school trust approached Nathaniel Woodard for help, but he was uninterested in buying or supporting the school.

In 1859, Hewett's dilapidated school buildings were bought for £1,615 by Philip Reginald Egerton, a Church of England curate working in Deddington. Like Hewett, he was strongly influenced by the Oxford Movement and sought to establish a new school to teach its values. Egerton adopted the previous foundation's name of All Saints' School, and its motto, but based the school's ethos on that of his alma mater, Winchester College. He sought the backing of several notable academics and clergymen, including Wilberforce, Woodard and Henry Liddon. The project was initially funded by Egerton's wealthy wife, Harriet, and received its first pupil on 31 January 1860. Under the personal leadership of Egerton, Bloxham initially provided education for middle-class boys in the public school tradition, although classics was originally not widely taught. In 1861 there were 29 pupils and by 1863 there were 60. Thanks to Wilberforce's continued support, Street drew up new plans for expanding the neo-Gothic school buildings, and additional money was provided by John Hubbard, 1st Baron Addington and John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough. The new buildings were unveiled in 1864 in the presence of Thomas Parker, 6th Earl of Macclesfield and Benjamin Disraeli. The Chapel Wing, the last of Street's buildings, was opened on 21 February 1873.

The school quickly grew, rising to two hundred pupils in twenty years. Despite Egerton's plans for the school to provide for local farmers and tradesmen, a report in 1870 found that most of the boys were from professional, ecclesiastical and military families. An 1879 plan by Egerton and Liddon to affiliate the school with Keble College, Oxford never came to fruition, and Egerton was forced to look elsewhere to ensure the school's long-term viability. The Bloxham School Trust was established in 1884, and in 1897 the school was admitted into the Woodard Corporation. Frederick Scobell Boissier, father of Harrow headmaster Arthur Boissier, taught at Bloxham from 1878 to 1898 and was headmaster from 1886. Education at the school focused on the notions of religious and civic duty, and the Anglo-Catholic nature of the foundation of the school remained a defining feature. Proposals to secularise the school by renaming it 'Bloxham College' were rejected in 1911 and 1951. Bloxham's first headmaster to not be a priest was only appointed in 1925.

During the 1890s, Bloxham shrank in size as the local provision of state education improved. The Education Act 1902 worsened the situation, as did a growing prejudice against high church practices in schools. The school's impressive academic record and high Oxbridge entrant rates in the 1900s helped it to survive. By the 1910s, a prefect system, house rivalries, corporal punishment and fagging confirmed Bloxham's identity as a conforming public school, although the latter two practices were abolished in the 1970s. Like many public schools, Bloxham suffered disproportionately high casualties during the First World War, in which over 400 current and former pupils served and 79 were killed. The school survived the subsequent economic depression, and embarked upon a series of ambitious educational and building reforms led by the school's first lay headmaster, Valentine Armitage. During the 1960s the school pioneered a tutoring system in which boys of multiple year groups shared a tutor. This system has since been imitated by many other boarding schools. Girls started to be admitted into the sixth form in small numbers in the early 1970s and the school became fully co-educational in 1998. The Lower School, for pupils aged 11–13, was opened in 1994.

The school achieved 52% 9-7 grades in the 2022 GCSEs.