Oakham School is a public school (English fee-charging boarding and day school) in Oakham, Rutland, England.
The school was founded in 1584 by Archdeacon Robert Johnson, along with Uppingham School, a few miles away. They share a common badge design (and a strong rivalry), but while Uppingham's colours tend towards blue and white, Oakham's are black and red.
Under headmaster John Buchanan, in 1971 Oakham was the first boys' independent secondary school in Britain to accept both male and female pupils throughout the whole school and not just in the sixth form. In 1995, it was the first public school to go on-line.
Leicestershire County Cricket Club occasionally plays games on the school grounds.
History
Oakham School was founded in 1584 by Robert Johnson, Archdeacon of Leicester. Johnson received an income from four church positions and used this wealth to set up a number of charitable institutions, including the two free grammar schools at Oakham and Uppingham. As someone on the Puritan wing of the Church of England he had a strong belief in the benefits of education.
According to Johnson's statutes for the school, "the schoolmaster shall teach all those grammar scholars that are brought up in Oakham, freely without pay, if their parents be poor and not able to pay, and keep them constantly to school." The master of the school was to teach Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Although the schooling was free, permanent attendance meant the loss to a family of an income, so not many very poor would have attended, or wanted the education. The master could supplement his income of £24 per year by taking in boarders. Johnson was careful to ensure that his schools were sufficiently endowed. This endowment was confirmed by royal charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I.
The original school building was restored in the eighteenth century and remained the sole classroom for 300 years. In 1749 a case involving payment of rates recorded that "the school of Uppingham is not nor hath been of equal repute with that of Oakham." The headmastership of John Doncaster (1808–46), himself a previous pupil at the school, saw the school advance academically: "This was the man who returned to his old school at the age of thirty-six, with University honours and university experience, to give it fresh life, and to set a mark on it which it never quite lost". Even so, numbers attending were well below 50, and while Uppingham flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century, Oakham did not to the same extent. Even so, in 1869 Oakham was one of the founding members of the Headmasters' Conference (HMC). In 1875 as a result of the Endowed Schools Act 1869 that threatened the continued existence of the school, there were just 2 day boys and 2 boarders in the school. The exhausted headmaster, William Spicer Wood (1846–75), retired and the new headmaster lasted just three years before being dismissed.
All classes were still taught in the one room - the original old school, which still exists next to the parish church. The school did see some development. Science and modern languages had recently been added to the curriculum. The subjects examined for a scholarship within the school were English history (1066-1603), geography of the British Isles, English grammar, arithmetic, English composition and dictation. A more successful headmaster, E. V. Hodge, headmaster from 1879 to 1902, saw numbers increase, to 125 in 1896, with slightly more boarders than day boys. Then followed onto the scene three successful headmasters - Walter Lee Sargant (1902–29) under whom numbers rose to over 200 with consequent new buildings, Francis Cecil Doherty (1929–34), who went on to be headmaster of Lancing), and Grosvenor Talbot Griffith (1935–57) who took the numbers to over three hundred - before the advent of John Buchanan.
The 125 of Hodge's time was a temporary peak - by 1905 numbers had fallen back to 66. Sargant's response to the obvious financial difficulties which accompanied this decline (there were just 80 boys in the school when he commenced his headmastership) was to apply in 1910 for direct grant status, and to become in effect the boys' grammar school for Rutland at the same time as continuing as a public school for the boarders. New facilities for science teaching were created, boarding accommodation was improved with new building and extensions, and then a new school house was built. Pupil numbers rose again, to 105 in 1910, and to 200 in 1923.