Thetford Grammar School is an independent

co-educational school Mixed-sex education, also known as mixed-gender education, co-education, or coeducation (abbreviated to co-ed or coed), is a system of education where males and females are educated together. Whereas single-sex education was more common up to t ...

Thetford Thetford is a market town and civil parish in the Breckland District of Norfolk, England. It is on the A11 road between Norwich and London, just east of Thetford Forest. The civil parish, covering an area of , in 2015 had a population of 24, ...

Norfolk Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the Nor ...

, England. The school might date back to the 7th century, which would make it one of the oldest schools in the United Kingdom.

History

The school website conjectures its origin traces back to 631,Thetford Grammar School - History
, accessed 17 Aug 2009 and through its Roll of Headmasters to 1114. The Independent Schools Inspectorate assert in their 2012 report that "The school was originally founded in the 10th Century" but without any evidence provided. It appears to have ceased from around 1496 until its refoundation from the will of Sir Richard Fulmerston in 1566.'Thetford, chapter 23: Of the school and hospital', An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk: volume 2 (1805), pp. 128-131. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=78041 Date accessed: 18 August 2009 The refoundation was confirmed by an Act of Parliament in 1610. Part of the school is built on the site of a thirteenth-century Dominican Friary ( Blackfriars, Thetford), which may have been built on, and incorporated parts of, a Norman cathedral. This building, now known as "Old School", comprised the entire school for about 300 years, and is where the lawyer Roger North and the political activist

Thomas Paine Thomas Paine (born Thomas Pain; – In the contemporary record as noted by Conway, Paine's birth date is given as January 29, 1736–37. Common practice was to use a dash or a slash to separate the old-style year from the new-style year. In th ...

were educated. In 1998 archaeologists from the television programme ''

Time Team ''Time Team'' is a British television programme that originally aired on Channel 4 from 16 January 1994 to 7 September 2014. It returned online in 2022 for two episodes released on YouTube. Created by television producer Tim ...

'' excavated at the school for three days in search of the Norman cathedral of Herbert Losinga, which was only located at Thetford for twenty years or so, before relocating to Norwich. They did not find any Norman stone building, perhaps because the short-lived cathedral was a re-used Anglo-Saxon wooden church which has not survived. The school developed rapidly in the 1880s, and in 1888 Thetford Grammar School for Girls was built alongside the existing Grammar School. The school became a

Voluntary controlled school A voluntary controlled school (VC school) is a state-funded school in England and Wales in which a foundation or trust (usually a Christian denomination) has some formal influence in the running of the school. Such schools have less autonomy tha ...

in 1944, and remained in the state sector until 1981 when it regained its independent status. The original boys' school and the girls' grammar school merged in 1975 to form a new coeducational school. Since 2017 the school has been owned by China Financial Services Holdings, a Hong Kong-based company.

Notable former pupils

* Jim Bacon – weather forecaster *

Francis Blomefield Rev. Francis Blomefield (23 July 170516 January 1752), FSA, Rector of Fersfield in Norfolk, was an English antiquarian who wrote a county history of Norfolk: ''An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk''. It includes ...

– topographer and historian *

Harold Chapman Harold Stephen Chapman (26 March 1927 – 19 August 2022) was a British photographer noted for chronicling the 1950s in Paris. Biography Chapman was born in Deal, Kent on 26 March 1927. He produced a large body of work over many years, with ...

– former orthodontist * C. H. Chapman – cartoonist * William G. Clarke (1877–1925) – journalist, naturalist, and archaeologist * Frederick Charles Frank – theoretical physicist * Thomas Howard – Duke of Norfolk * Allan Noel Minns – DSO, MC, doctor * Roger North – musicologist, Attorney General from 1688 *

– American revolutionary and author, attended 1744-1749 * Alfred Neobard Palmer – chemist and historian *

James Pattinson James Lee Pattinson (born 3 May 1990) is an Australian cricketer. Pattinson is considered an aggressive fast bowler. After making his Test cricket debut in late 2011, he played Test and limited overs cricket for the Australia national cricket t ...

(1915–2009) – writer of thrillers

References

External links

Thetford Grammar School

Profile
on the

Independent Schools Council The Independent Schools Council (ISC) is a non-profit lobby group that represents over 1,300 schools in the United Kingdom's independent education sector. The organisation comprises seven independent school associations and promotes the busi ...

website
Independent Schools Inspectorate Report
{{Authority control Independent schools in Norfolk 7th-century establishments in England Educational institutions established in the 7th century Thetford