Beechen Cliff School is a boys' secondary school in Bath, Somerset, England, with about 1,150 pupils. Its earliest predecessor school was founded in 1896.
There are around 930 boys in years 7 to 11 and a co-educational sixth form of 402 pupils.[1] The school offers the option of state boarding. It is located just south of the city centre near Alexandra Park, up a hill from Bear Flat on the A367, a major route from the south of the city into Bath.
History
List of headmasters
The school began in 1896 as Bath City Secondary School in the Guildhall.[2][3]
It moved from the Guildhall Technical College[4] to its present site at Beechen Cliff in 1932 when it was renamed the City of Bath Boys' School.[5]
It changed to its present name in 1970 when the City of Bath reorganised secondary education. The grammar school was amalgamated with Oldfield Boys' School, a local secondary modern school founded in 1903, to form a comprehensive school.
On 7 August 1988, on a school climbing expedition in the Briançon region of the French Alps, the 57-year-old headmaster Donald Stephens fell 300 feet (91 m) to his death. Fifteen pupils and three members of staff were on the expedition, training for a walk up Mount Kenya, and witnessed the tragic incident. A library has been established in his memory.
Bath from the top of Beechen Cliff, in Alexandra Park adjacent to the school
A review of Bath secondary provision by Avon County Council in the 1980s proposed that the school be closed and replaced with a sixth form college on the same site serving the whole city. Partisans of the school, however, took advantage of new legislation to obtain grant-maintained status for the school, taking it out of local authority control, which the then Government permitted despite a policy that schools would not be allowed to use grant-maintained (GM) status as a way of avoiding closure.
In February 1990 Avon County Council took the Secretary of State for Education and Science, John MacGregor, to the High Court to prevent the school gaining GM status and thus fatally undermining its Bath schools reorganisation plan; on 24 February Mr Justice Hutchison ruled in favour of the council, obliging the Secretary of State to reconsider his decision. On 30 March the Minister accordingly reconsidered his decision, but came to the same conclusion as before, that the school should be GM funded. In a vote, 55% of parents supported the change of status.[6] At a further judicial review hearing by the High Court on 15 May, Lord Justice Mustill upheld the Minister's decision. The Director of Education at Avon, Dr Christopher Saville, said he was 'very disappointed'.
Former pupil and winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the mechanism of gene-splicing, Richard J. Roberts, donated a substantial part of his prize money to help the school build a new science centre, called the Richard Roberts Science Centre.[7]
Since 2014 the school has offered boarding places for boys at the school.[10]
In July 2018 the school was severely criticised following an unannounced Ofsted inspection, which downgraded its rating for overall effectiveness from outstanding to inadequate. The report was particularly critical of the handling of a serious safeguarding incident earlier in 2018 in which pupils chained a black pupil to a lamppost and whipped him in a "mock slave auction", and of the effectiveness of the leadership and management. The report stated the school was misusing extended study leave as a form of unlawful exclusion. The chair and vice chair of governors resigned. The inspection had been unannounced because the Chief Inspector of Schools had concerns about safeguarding, leadership and the quality of education at the school.[1][11][12] The headmaster had decided to expel three of the seven pupils involved, but a panel of three governors in a disciplinary hearing decided the three pupils should not be permanently excluded.[13] The police investigated the "mock slave auction" incident, and seven pupils admitted involvement in a hate crime, two undergoing a restorative justice "community resolution process" involving the victim.[14][15]
In September 2018 the Schools Adjudicator found that the school's admission policy was unreasonable and unfair, stating that the "school has a less deprived intake than the other state-funded schools in the city" due to rules such as giving priority to siblings of Hayesfield Girls' School pupils, allocating 40% of places to children living in affluent areas north of the River Avon and 20% to children living outside Bath. The Adjudicator ordered changes to 16 aspects of the school's admissions policy.[16][17]
In the early 1930s the main building was built on the site of Lyncombe Hill Farm to enable the move from the Guildhall.[8]
In the early 1970s sixth form, science, technology, humanities and sports buildings were built on the eastern playing fields to support the merger of schools into a comprehensive school.[8]
In 1983 an avenue of elm trees, which ran within an ancient hedge along the road to the south of the lower playing fields, contracted Dutch elm disease and had to be felled; replacement trees of different species were planted by subscription of local residents, though not all survived to maturity. In 2000 the school proposed to sell off the lower part of its playing fields for housing development. Although the latest school inspection report had remarked that the playing fields were small for the school,[20] the required consent was obtained from the DfEE, but there was vigorous opposition from the local community and planning permission was refused.[21]
In 1997 the science building was extended, part funded by former pupil Sir Richard J. Roberts from his Nobel Prize award,[7] and the arts building relocated into a new building enabling improvements to the canteen.[8]
Partnerships
Beechen Cliff is home to schoolboys on the full-time training model at Southampton. Beechen Cliff and Bath Rugby have an Academic and Sporting Excellence (AASE) programme at the school and play in RFU's National AASE League.
The school is home to Bath Theatre School and together have a musical theatre partnership that puts on a production once a year.
Outdoor education
The school takes part in a number of annual challenges that include the Centurion Challenge (a 100-mile walk from Bath to Hungerford and back in 48 hours), Duke of Edinburgh, Ten Tors (teams complete hikes of up to 55 miles across Dartmoor), 100 mile Coast to Coast Cycle ride across Devon and the Three Peaks Challenge.
The Centurion Challenge is an annual long-distance event organised by Beechen Cliff School, Bath. The event is open to pupils of the school and usually takes place on the first weekend of July. The objective of the challenge is to walk/run 100 miles in 48 hours.
Beechen Cliff School main building, with sixth form and technology buildings on the right
^Whiffing, Phil (10 September 2018). ADA3413: Beechen Cliff School(PDF) (Report). Office of the Schools Adjudicator. Archived from the original(PDF) on 12 September 2018. Retrieved 12 September 2018.
