King's College, Taunton:

King's College is a British coeducational, secondary boarding school in Taunton, Somerset, England. It is an independent school of 420 pupils aged 13-18, including about 302 boarders. The head of the school is currently Richard Biggs, who started his first academic year in the winter of 2007.

History

Kings College Taunton was founded in 1880. The building was designed by C.E. Giles and built between 1867 and 1869. A new chapel followed in 1903 designed by W. E. Tower. It has been designated as a Grade II listed building.^[1]

Benjamin Disraeli stood for MP in Taunton, and many of his early political appearances took place on what is currently the school's 1st XI cricket pitch. After the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie I fled in exile to Bath. During his stay in the UK many of his younger children went to Kings College, and the Emperor himself distributed the awards at the end of every academic year.^[2] Many of the boarding houses still hold trophies related to now defunct activities on which is it inscribed that that particular prize was handed out by Haile Selassie. A portrait of the Emperor once hung in the main school building. Before the General Election in 1964, the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, addressed a public meeting at the school.

The School became co-educational in the very early 1970s (in that it admitted females into the Sixth Form). It currently has seven boarding houses: Bishop Fox, King Alfred, Woodard (After Nathaniel Woodard) Tuckwell, Meynell, Taylor and Carpenter. All these houses, plus Neates, which no longer exists, were male boarding houses until the early 1990s, when Meynell converted to become the first all female boarding house. Taylor house was later founded as a female boarding house. Carpenter became a female boarding house in the mid 1990s. Until the conversion to full coeducational status, Sixth Form girls were assigned to one of the male boarding houses but lived in separate accommodation.

The transition to full coeducational status caused some controversy amongst the male students at the time, particularly amongst those in the boarding houses that were becoming female boarding houses. Students, who had developed a bond to their boarding houses over a number of years, were moved to other houses and many who went through the transition still consider their 'first' house to be their only house. In July 2006, two members of staff accompanied a small group of pupils who had recently left the school on a charity trip to India to construct a house for an Indian family.

In 2007 the school choir took part in a choral competition on the BBC's Songs of Praise and came first, and in the same year the senior rugby team were victorious in the The National Schools 7's.

King's College was in the news in January 2009 after expelling two students of sixth form age for having a consensual sexual relationship, taking place outside of the school, that resulted in pregnancy.^[3]

Notable Old Aluredians