If you went to a school called St Joseph's Catholic Primary School, you share your alma mater's exact name with 53 other schools. It is the most duplicated school name in Britain, and it is not a close contest. We counted the names of all 30,187 schools in our education dataset to find out what the country calls its classrooms.
The most duplicated names
| Rank | Exact school name | Schools |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | St Joseph's Catholic Primary School | 54 |
| 2 | St Mary's Catholic Primary School | 42 |
| 3 | St Mary's CofE Primary School | 22 |
| 4 | Holy Family Catholic Primary School | 20 |
| 5 | St Patrick's Catholic Primary School | 18 |
| 6 | St Peter's Catholic Primary School | 17 |
| 7 | St Paul's CofE Primary School | 16 |
| 7 | Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School | 16 |
Every single entry in the top eight is a faith school, which tells you where naming conventions are strongest. Secular schools tend to take their name from their town or street, which keeps them unique. Church schools draw from a much smaller pool of saints, so the same names repeat from Cornwall to Cumbria.
The saints' league
Widen the count from exact names to dedications and a clear hierarchy emerges. St Mary leads British education by a distance, with 458 schools carrying her name. St John follows on 306, then St Joseph on 216 and St Peter on 201. The gap to the rest is large: St Paul manages 142, St Michael 132, and the patron saints of the home nations have a surprisingly quiet time of it. St George lends his name to just 83 schools in the country of which he is patron, St Patrick to 50, and St David to only 16.
What the words reveal
The vocabulary of school names is its own history lesson. The word Primary appears in 13,255 names, which is getting on for half of all schools. Academy appears in 3,993, almost all of them renamed in the last twenty years, so the word is effectively a time stamp for the 2010s in the same way Board School stamped the 1870s. Community appears 1,180 times. And 164 schools still carry the word Grammar, a survival from a system that once counted them in the thousands.
How we worked it out
We counted exact name matches across the 30,187 schools in our dataset, which is built from the Department for Education's register and its equivalents. The saints' league uses pattern matching on the dedication, so St Mary's, St Mary Magdalene and St Mary and St Joseph all count towards Mary. Explore the schools near any postcode with our school catchment finder.