Bedales School - History

History

The school was started in 1893 by Badley and his wife in a rented house called Bedales, just outside Lindfield, near Haywards Heath. In 1899 Badley purchased a country estate near Steep and constructed a purpose-built school, including state of the art electric light, which opened in 1900. The site has been extensively developed over the past century, including the relocation of a number of historic vernacular timber frame barns. A preparatory school, Dunhurst, was started in 1902 on Montessori principles (and was visited in 1919 by Dr Montessori herself), and a primary school, Dunnannie, was added in the 1950s.

Badley took a non-denominational approach to religion and the school has never had a chapel: its relatively secular teaching made it attractive in its early days to non-conformists, agnostics, Quakers, Unitarians and liberal Jews, who formed a significant element of its early intake. The school was also well known and popular in some Cambridge and Fabian intellectual circles with connections to the Wedgwoods, Darwins, Huxleys, and Trevelyans. Books such as A quoi tient la superiorité des Anglo-Saxons? and L'Education nouvelle popularised the school on the Continent, leading to a cosmopolitan intake of Russian and other European children in the 1920s.

Bedales was originally a small and initimate school: the 1900 buildings were designed for 150 pupils. Under a necessary programme of expansion and modernisation in the 1960s and 1970s under the headmastership of Tim Slack, the senior school grew from 240 pupils in 1966 to 340, thereafter increasing to some 465.