Samuel Whitbread Upper School Clifton

Samuel Whitbread Upper School March 2007

Samuel Whitbread Upper School lies just east of the parish boundary with Shefford. It was first planned, as South-East Bedfordshire Upper School Number in 1968 and opened in 1972.

The school was designed as part of a process known as Comprehensive Reorganisation in which the structure laid down by the 1944 Education Act of children being sent at age eleven to either a Grammar School or a Secondary Modern, depending on their academic ability was shelved in favour of a three tier system for all children. The three tier system comprised Lower Schools for those aged 4-9, Middle Schools for those aged 9-13 and Upper Schools for those aged over thirteen. Children from a cluster of lower schools would all go to the same middle school and two or three middle schools would all feed into the same upper school.

Nine year-olds are transferred to Samuel Whitbread from Etonbury Middle School, Arlesey (which actually sent children to Fearnhill School in Letchworth [Hertfordshire] until 1986), Henlow V.C.Middle School and Robert Bloomfield Middle School, Shefford. The school catchment area thus includes the following civil parishes:

• Arlesey
• Astwick
• Campton
• Chicksands
• Clifton
• Henlow
• Meppershall
• Old Warden
• Shefford
• Shillington
• Southill
• Stondon
• Stotfold

Children also attend from the hamlet of Beadlow in Clophill and children from Langford attend both Samuel Whitbread and StrattonUpperSchool, Biggleswade.