Marlborough College

Marlborough College is a co-educational independent school for day and boarding pupils, located in Marlborough, Wiltshire.

Founded in 1843 for the education of the sons of Church of England clergy, the school now accepts both boys and girls of all beliefs. Currently there are just over 800 pupils, approximately one third of whom are female. New pupils are admitted at the ages of 13+ ("Shell entry") and 16 (Lower Sixth).

Marlborough was, in 1968, the first major British independent school to allow girls into the sixth form, setting a trend that many other schools would follow. The College became fully co-educational in 1989. The College has also been pioneering in other fields, making a major contribution to the School Mathematics Project (from 1961) and initiating the teaching of Business Studies at A level (from 1968). Fagging was officially abolished in the 1920s, and Marlborough was one of the first public schools to do so. However, unofficial fagging did persist beyond this change for some time. In 1963 a group of boys, led by the future political biographer Ben Pimlott, wrote a book, "Marlborough, an open examination written by the boys," describing life at the school. The writer and television critic T.C. Worsley wrote about predatory masters at the school in his critically acclaimed autobiography Flannelled Fool: A Slice of a Life in the Thirties.

The Good Schools Guide described Marlborough as a "Famous, designer label, co-ed boarding school still riding high." The school is a member of the G20 Schools Group.

In 2005 the school was one of fifty of the country's leading independent schools which were found guilty of running an illegal price-fixing cartel, exposed by The Times, which had allowed them to drive up fees for thousands of parents. Each school was required to pay a nominal penalty of £10,000 and all agreed to make ex-gratia payments totalling three million pounds into a trust designed to benefit pupils who attended the schools during the period in respect of which fee information was shared. However, Mrs Jean Scott, the head of the Independent Schools Council, said that independent schools had always been exempt from anti-cartel rules applied to business, were following a long-established procedure in sharing the information with each other, and that they were unaware of the change to the law (on which they had not been consulted). She wrote to John Vickers, the OFT director-general, saying, "They are not a group of businessmen meeting behind closed doors to fix the price of their products to the disadvantage of the consumer. They are schools that have quite openly continued to follow a long-established practice because they were unaware that the law had changed."