Ottershaw School

Ottershaw School was founded in 1948 as an English school for boys in Ottershaw Park, Ottershaw, approximately southwest of London between Chertsey and Woking, Surrey, south of England, on an estate that dated back to 1761, when the first house was built there. History It was the first local authority boarding school to be set up, following the recommendations of the 1943 Fleming Report, which were implemented in the Butler Education Act, of the following year. The David Fleming, Lord Fleming parliamentary committee, explored ways in which the benefits of a public school education could be made more widely available to those young people whose financial means and backgrounds made it difficult for them to enter what was an exclusive and expensive system. Ottershaw had no entrance examination or financial barrier for students to be accepted as boarders. School fees were subject to a means test, the poorest students receiving a bursary from the county council if their parents applied for one. The criterion for entry was a boy's "boarding school need", in other words, those students most likely to benefit from a residential education away from their home. Thus, many students came from families broken up by the Second World War, other such dire circumstances, or from environments that were not conducive to academic or personal development. There was, too, a proportion of entrants who wished to attend a boarding school but whose parents could not afford the fees at a traditional public school (United Kingdom). Entry was not totally restricted to children of Surrey residents. Ottershaw was established by Surrey County Council (SCC) in 1948, as a boarding school for boys aged 12 to 18. It was the first of its kind in the country to be entirely in the hands of a Local Education Authority.