Kingswood School

Kingswood School is a private day and boarding school in Bath, Somerset, England. The school is coeducational and educates over 1,000 pupils aged 9 months to 18 years. It was founded by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, in 1748, and is the world's oldest Methodist educational institution. The school was established to provide an education for the sons of colliers and Methodist ministers. It owns the Kingswood Preparatory School, the Upper and Middle Playing Fields and a number of other buildings.

Kingswood School was founded by John Wesley in 1748 in Kingswood (then known as King's Wood) near Bristol as a school for the children of the local colliers. The ministers in the early Methodist Church were itinerant and the school started to accept their children as boarders. Eventually the ministers' sons became the whole establishment, along with a few non-boarding local girls. After Wesley's death, Rev Joseph Bradford was appointed as the first governor in 1795. Woodhouse Grove School was founded in 1812 and was linked with Kingswood as a prep school for much of the nineteenth century. Created in 1995, Kingswood Prep School had 300 pupils in 2010. In 2010, the number of students attending the Kingswood School campus between the ages of 9 months and 18 was 960.

The 1862 book How it was done at Stow School written by Theophilus Woolmer seems to have been based upon the author's own experiences at Kingswood (rather than Stowe School which was not yet established) under the notorious headmaster Crowther, who enforced harsh discipline in the school in the 1820s.

The school moved to its present site on the northern slopes of Bath in 1851. It is in the midst of 218 acres (0.88 km²) of the former Lansdown estate of the nineteenth-century millionaire eccentric, William Thomas Beckford. The Upper Playing Fields, comprising some 57 acres, are to the north of the senior school and include an athletics track and tennis and netball courts.

Sons of lay people were first admitted to the school in 1922.

1939 This stone 1946
from the buildings of
Uppingham School
records thanksgiving
for friendship and
preservation in exile

This stone
from the buildings of
Kingswood School
records enduring
gratitude for friendship
and preservation 1939–1946

During World War II the Kingswood buildings were requisitioned by the government and used by the Admiralty for military planning purposes. The school was evacuated to Uppingham School in the East Midlands and continued to function there. The Mulberry harbours used on D-day for the landing on the Normandy beaches were designed at the school and for many years it was thought that they were named after the Mulberry tree that still stands at the front of the school, whereas Mulberry was simply the next code word on a list.