Sir Graham Balfour School is a secondary school in Stafford

Stafford

Stafford is the county town of Staffordshire, in the West Midlands region of England. It lies approximately north of Wolverhampton and south of Stoke-on-Trent, adjacent to the M6 motorway Junction 13 to Junction 14...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. It is named after Sir Graham Balfour

Sir Graham Balfour

Sir Graham Balfour was a noted educationalist and son of Surgeon General Thomas Graham Balfour, who worked closely with Florence Nightingale.-Biography and links with RLS:...

, the Victorian statistician and member Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale OM, RRC was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night...

's inner circle.

The original school was demolished in 2001, with the new school building being constructed and completed in 2002. Sir Graham Balfour School currently has 900 students.

It achieved specialist Maths and Computing School status from September 2006. The current headteacher is David Wright.

Sir Graham Balfour School also offers post-16 education. The sixth form is an integral part of the Stafford Collegiate which involves all Stafford High Schools and Stafford College.

Recent achievements

After 3 years of raising money, in 2004 the school raised enough to build a school in Thmar Bang, Cambodia

Cambodia

Cambodia , officially known as the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia...

, and regular fund raising helps to support it.

In 2007 OFSTED judged Sir Graham Balfour to be “a good school with outstanding features”. .
In the same year the DfEs performance tables ranked Sir Graham Balfour School as the 9th most improved in England for sustained improvement over a four year period.

In 2008 Balfour saw 66% of its Y11 students achieve five or more A*-C grades; a record for the School.

During the same year the School was also the host of the BYFA Summer School.

Controversy

Sir Graham Balfour School hit national headlines in May 2005 when then-headteacher David Hill banned charity wristbands due to uniform regulations. This resulted in many students forming a mass protest on the school tennis grounds. Police were called to the school after students began vandalising property and leaving the school grounds. Although Hill claimed that a small number of students protested, the actual number was more than 300, and included almost 60% of the student body. The protest lasted for around 3 hours until students either left the school premises or entered the school hall where a debate ensued about the bands. Hill later retracted the ban on the bands.

External links

• Official website