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Samuel Whitbread Upper School Clifton

Samuel Whitbread Upper School
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.