Old Wykehamists: Who has attended the historic private school?
The £42,000-a-year Hampshire school is the alma mater of six chancellors: Henry Addington, Robert Lowe, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Gaitskell, Geoffrey Howe and Rishi Sunak.
Other senior government figures include former culture secretary John Whittingdale and former Tory minister Nick Boles.
In the world of film and TV, its alumni include Joss Whedon, the director behind the Avengers movie and the Buffy the Vampire TV series, as well as actors Hugh Dancy and Charles Edwards.
The school also taught several successful athletes including Olympic rower George Nash MBE, India s cricket captain Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi and George Mallory, the pioneering Everest mountaineer.
Winchester College is to overturn centuries of tradition by taking girl pupils for the first time, it announced today. The 700-pupil private school is to admit girls and day pupils into the Sixth Form as part of what it calls a wider modernisation agenda . Alumni, parents, staff, boys and future parents will be consulted on how best to implement the changes. The school, where fees are around £42,000 a year, today announced ‘Winchester College in the 21st Century’, a new vision and significant programme of change for the school. The Governing Body says it is confident that the changes will enable the school to continue its unique approach to education, based on values which have endured for centuries.
The modernisation agenda aims to have the first girl boarders admitted in 2024
9 February 2021 • 7:28pm
The issue of whether to teach girls at the £41,709-a-year school has been a matter of debate for over a hundred years
Credit: Christopher Pillitz/Corbis Historical
It is one of the country’s last bastions of all boys’ boarding schools. But Winchester College is to admit girls and day pupils for the first time in its 640-year history, as part of a “modernisation agenda”.
From next year, male and female day pupils will be able to join the school in the Sixth Form, with the aim that the first girl boarders will be admitted in 2024.