History of the School

In 1978 Peter Pyemont, the Head of the highly successful and forward thinking St Bede’s Co-educational Preparatory School in Eastbourne, decided to open a Senior School. A separate Educational Trust was formed and Peter and the newly formed Board of Governors asked Roger Perrin to set up and develop the new school. Starting with 23 pupils in 2 classrooms, converted from Peter’s garage at St Bede’s in Eastbourne, the School, St Bede’s Senior School, the first co-educational independent senior school in East Sussex apart from the Rudolf Steiner schools, found new premises in Upper Dicker. Between March 1979 and September of that year the dilapidated, leaking house known as The Dicker and its seven acres of potentially delightful wilderness was put in order.

In September the School, now 69 students and 6 teachers moved in and St Bede’s at The Dicker started life. Over the next 22 years Roger Perrin and his wife Angela oversaw the development of the School. By then with 600 students and its own particular and all inclusive philosophy it had, from being the smallest, become the largest Independent Senior School in East Sussex. By the Millennium it occupied nearly 150 acres on which stood a charming array of accommodation ranging from the country houses to a village Shop to converted outbuildings to self built timber boarding houses and classrooms to sundry portacabins. To complete the picture The St Bede’s Preparatory School Trust was, in 1999, was taken into the Senior School Trust to become the Bede’s you know today.