The site for the St Bede’s School was agreed in principle as long ago as 1952 but was not included in a building programme until 1962. 

Work commenced in January 1964. The Diocese asked for a building sufficient for 120 pupils to be completed by September of the same year (within 8 months!).  

In 1965 the Diocese requested an expansion to take student numbers to 420 pupils. This was completed the same year. 

St Bede’s was then later redesigned to accomodate 720 pupils as a Grammer Technical and later an extension built to enable a total of 870 students to attend.  

Over latter years the Sixth Form Extension and YarD Block have been built to accomodate our expanding and oversubscribed school.  

We now welcome over 1300 students each year. 

Tribute to Bede

The seventh century was one of the most important centuries in the history of the Church in England.  Although the Faith had found a foothold long before, England was still largely pagan when St Augustine and his Benedictine monks began their conversion od the country in Canterbury in A.D. 597.  In the course of the next century, however, largely owing to the work of the Benedictine Order, the Church penetrated to practically every corner of England, particularly to the North, where lived and worked two of the greatest of English saints, Saint Benedict Biscop and Saint Bede. 

It can be fairly said that without Benedict Biscop we should never have heard of St Bede, for it was Biscop who provided the circumstances in which Bede’s special talents and sanctity developed.  In 674 Biscop, a monk of noble birth and wide culture and learning, founded the monastery of St Peter on land at Wearmouth given by King Egfrid of Northumbria, and eight years later founded the twin monastery of Saint Paul, at Jarrow a few miles away. 

Bede himself tells us that in 680, at the age of seven, he was entrusted to the care of Benedict Biscop at Wearmouth, whether as an orphan or as a postulant to the order is not clear.  However, when Abbot Ceolfrith went to Jarrow to take charge of the new monastery there, Bede went with him and pursued a life of study, prayer, worship, teaching and writing.