Caterham School

Caterham School was founded in 1811 as the Congregational School — a charitable foundation to educate the sons of Congregationalist clergy and Christian missionaries. The school was named for the Surrey town of Caterham and originally based at Lewisham; it moved to its present 80-acre Caterham campus in 1884, occupying buildings designed by the architect Henry Fuller. The Congregational origin gave Caterham a distinctive Nonconformist Christian identity that has gradually broadened into general non-denominational Christian observance. The school became co-educational in 1995 with the merger of the boys' Caterham School and the neighbouring Eothen Girls' School. Today it is a co-educational HMC day and boarding school for ages 3-18. The Head Master is Ceri Jones.

Caterham's most internationally recognised alumnus is Angus Deayton, the actor and broadcaster best known for fifteen years as the chair of Have I Got News for You and for his role as Patrick Trench in BBC's One Foot in the Grave. Deayton attended Caterham in the 1960s and 70s. The composer and arranger Imogen Holst CBE, daughter of Gustav Holst (composer of The Planets) and a major figure in twentieth-century English music in her own right, was a Caterham pupil in the late 1910s before her studies at the Royal College of Music. Chukwudi Iwuji, who was Head Boy at Caterham and is now a Royal Shakespeare Company actor (and Marvel Cinematic Universe appearances in The Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3), is another arts alumnus.

In intelligence history, Sir Paul Dukes KBE — "The Man with a Hundred Faces" — was educated at Caterham before his recruitment to MI6 by Mansfield Smith-Cumming (the original "C"); his clandestine work in St Petersburg during the 1905 Russian Revolution made him one of the most highly decorated British secret-service officers of the twentieth century. In academia and public life: William Pickford, President of the Football Association; the Cambridge classicist and BBC presenter Dr Nigel Spivey; the Reagan administration Special Assistant on Middle East affairs Geoffrey Kemp; and the British Empire historian Professor W. David McIntyre OBE.

Caterham operates a substantial bursary programme intended to preserve the school's foundation principle of educational access regardless of family means.