St Thomas More Catholic Upper School

General information

St Thomas More Catholic School is a mixed secondary school and sixth form located in Bedford in the English county of Bedfordshire.The school is located on Tyne Crescent in the Brickhill area of north Bedford. The school has no specific catchment area, but attracts students from all over Bedford and the surrounding villages.St Thomas More specialises in humanities and is a specialist teaching school. It was allocated one of the first 100 places of its kind. The school also provides special hearing provision.The name of the school is derived from St Thomas More, an elder statesman from the sixteenth century. He is mainly remembered for his principled refusal to accept King Henry VIII's claim to be the supreme head of the Church of England, which decision ended his political career and led to his execution as a traitor. He was canonized by the Catholic Church under Pope Pius XI in 1935, and was later declared the patron saint of lawyers and statesmen.HistoryFollowing the 1967 Plowden Report, Bedfordshire LEA decided to implement the three-tier education system of lower, middle and upper schools in the county. This created a need for a new Roman Catholic upper school (ages 13 to 18) in Bedford.