The School was formed by the Gild of the Holy Cross and received the royal charter of King Edward VI on 2 January 1552 [3] together with £20 per annum returned by the Crown for educational purposes.

The charter of the "free Grammer Schole" of King Edward VI was issued on 2 January 1552, and the school came into being in the former guild building on New Street.

[4] The affairs of the school in the early part of the 18th century were dominated by a quarrel between a governor and the headmaster, but this notwithstanding, a new Georgian-inspired building was built on the New Street site between 1731 and 1734.

Sports became an important feature, through games afternoons, and the dominance of Classics was lessened by the introduction of mathematics and science.

The move was complicated by the outbreak of the Second World War, and the subsequent evacuation of the pupils to Repton School for a short period.

This use included, from February 1945, the basing of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion: the only all-female, all-Black US Army unit to be deployed overseas during the war.

The 855 women of the battalion were sent to Birmingham to sort and redirect a huge backlog of mail for US service personnel in Europe.

[14] In 2012, the Independent review of A-level and IB results, based on government-issued statistics, ranked King Edward's School 9th in the UK, ahead of Westminster (17th), St Paul's (22nd), Harrow (34th), Winchester (73rd) and Eton (80th).

The chapel, a Grade II* listed building, was originally part of the upper corridor of the 1838 New Street school (built by Charles Barry).

Numerous players have been called to the City of Birmingham Youth Squad and English Schools Water Polo teams.

This includes dwelling on the Chief Master's rostrum "Sapientia" (see above) and the direct use of some personal surnames of staff and pupils from that period.

Scenes involving the Combined Cadet Force, a central theme in the film, recreate the atmosphere of the school at that time.

[24] Jonathan Coe's novel The Rotters' Club was begun while he was at KES, and he said that the background detail of the school (renamed King William's) and the Birmingham suburbs came from his own life.

Alumni of the school include two Nobel laureates, a Fields medallist, and J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Most famous for discovering the structure of DNA, along with Watson and Crick, his research contributed to the scientific understanding of phosphorescence, isotope separation, optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction, and to the development of radar.

Twenty years later, another pupil of the school, Sir John Vane shared the 1982 Nobel Prize for Medicine for "discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances".

Another alumnus, Enoch Powell, remains an influential albeit controversial figure in British politics, serving in various Ministerial positions between 1957 and 1968, when he was sacked by Conservative Party leader Edward Heath for his "Rivers of Blood" speech.

[28][29] In business, Sir Paul Ruddock, a hedge fund manager who served as chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum, chairman of the University of Oxford Endowment, and co-founder and CEO of Lansdowne Partners, an alternative investment management firm, was an alumnus of the school.