Between 1736 and 1740, James Cook was educated at a charity school in Great Ayton, which was built in 1704 by local landowner, Michael Postgate.  The building that stands there now is not the original, but was built from the materials of it in 1785.  Since 1928 it has housed the Captain Cook Schoolroom Museum, which, since a Lottery Grant-funded reorganisation in 1998, now features a reconstruction of a schoolroom from the early eighteenth century.

The commorative plaque on the outside of the building is the work of Nicholas Dimbleby who also sculpted the statue of James Cook as an adolescent which stands on the High Green.