Cheam School

Cheam School

Established	1645
Type	Other Independent School
Religion	Church of England
Headteacher	Mark Johnson
Location	Headley Thatcham RG19 8LD  England
Local authority	Hampshire
DfE URN	116520
Gender	Coeducational
Ages	5–13

Coordinates: 51°21′11″N 1°15′28″W / 51.35298°N 1.25786°W / 51.35298; -1.25786

Cheam School is a preparatory school in Headley in the civil parish of Ashford Hill with Headley in the English county of Hampshire. It was founded in 1645 by the Reverend George Aldrich in Cheam, Surrey and has been in operation ever since.

The school started in a house called Whitehall, now the site of a museum and visited on an annual basis by the younger children. The first event of any real note in the School's history was the Great Plague of London in 1665, when there was a great exodus from the City of London and villages like Cheam were suddenly overrun by children who had been sent there by wealthy parents in an attempt to escape the ravages of the plague.

In 1719, the School moved to Tabor Court, where it remained for over 200 years. The move from Cheam to the present site took place in 1934, when the area was developing from a quiet leafy village to a busy suburb. Just before it moved, the Duke of Edinburgh was a pupil there. His son, the Prince of Wales, was also a pupil at this school.

The school occupies nearly a 100 acres (400,000 m²) of Hampshire countryside with grounds and gardens, near the border with Berkshire.

Two mergers in the 1990s, with Hawtreys and Inhurst House, have helped to establish Cheam as one of the leading co-educational schools in the country. Cheam School now educates boys and girls between the ages of three and thirteen. It has a combination of boarders and day-students.

The current headmaster of Cheam School is Mark Johnson, who has been there since 1998. Mark Johnson won the 2007 Tatler Magazine 'Best Headmaster of a Prep School'. The school has a high level of academic work, as well as drama productions, music and sports.

Nearly a third of pupils in the last two years have gained Scholarships and Exhibitions to Public Schools. Academic awards were earned in 2010 to schools such as Winchester, Radley, Marlborough, Cheltenham Ladies' College, Wycombe Abbey, Wellington and Harrow taking the current scholarship haul to seventeen for the year.

The school has also toured South Africa in a sporting capacity several times, most recently in 2009 when the 1st XI cricket and 1st VII netball teams secured victories in nine out of eleven matches as well as raising £10,000 for the local Red Cross Children's Hospital. Both these teams qualified for the National JET finals in the same year and the cricketers have repeated this achievement in 2010.

There are four houses (known as divisions): Aldrich (yellow), Beck (green), Gilpin (red), and Tabor (blue). The school colours are red and blue.

Notable alumni or former pupils

• Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, consort of Queen Elizabeth II
• Charles, Prince of Wales, heir to the thrones of the Commonwealth realms
• Lord Dunsany, writer
• Charles Bathurst, 1st Viscount Bledisloe, GCMG, KBE, PC (September 21, 1867 – July 3, 1958).
• Ivo Bligh, 8th Earl of Darnley, England's first Ashes winning captain
• Lord Randolph Churchill, Conservative cabinet minister and father of Winston Churchill
• Arthur Kinnaird, 11th Lord Kinnaird, footballer and banker
• Reginald Drax, admiral
• William Fletcher rower
• Jake Meyer 7 summits mountaineer
• Robert S de Ropp researcher and writer on human potential

See also

• List of the oldest schools in the United Kingdom

External links

• Official site