Merchant Taylors’ Girls’ School is to merge with Merchant Taylors’ Boys’ to create a single, co-educational senior school from September next year.

The newly created Merseyside school will be known as Merchant Taylors’ School and will teach pupils aged four to 18. It will be based at the boy’s school site, known as the Harrison site.

In a statement on its website Merchant Taylor’ said: “This strategic development allows us to broaden and strengthen our academic provision, while developing new opportunities and ensuring that access to those opportunities is the same for every pupil at Merchant Taylors’.

“Re-modelling our structure to become co-educational will provide greater operational and financial efficiency and will allow the School to help ensure that every pound generated in fee income from parents is invested to support the pupil experience. Uniting the Senior Schools on one site will mean that we can invest in one estate, refurbishing and developing it to meet, and indeed exceed, the requirements of all our community.

“Merchant Taylors’ School has a remarkable history, with every right to be proud of its achievements over the last 400 years. However, there is no room for complacency. The world is changing fast and we need to move with it whilst staying true to our founding purpose ‘for the teaching, educating, and instructing of youth’. The core of our strategy is the creation of a more outward-looking school which reflects modern society, generous in its commitments to partnerships and service to others, inclusive and diverse in its outlook, forward thinking and digitally acute, operating with the advice of, and in partnership with those at the cutting edge of change and with the schools around us. Society continues to evolve and it is our firm intention that the School adapts accordingly with agility and integrity.

“In undertaking this change, the Governors are determined to retain all that is good from both the Girls’ and Boys’ Schools. This will ensure that both the new co-educational Senior School, and indeed Merchant Taylors’ as a whole, becomes the best future-facing version of itself, understanding and serving the needs of its community as it has done for the last 400 years.”