The Seckford Foundation has NOT run Woodbridge School for 400 years

Thomas Seckford who founded an
Almshouse charity, not a school

A big part of the selling point of the Seckford Foundation is that they have run Woodbridge School for over 400 years. They include this on the front page of their free school websites:

Beccles Free School will be a Seckford Foundation school, and as such will benefit from the Foundation's 400 years of expertise in education.

I have heard and read this many times and not given it much thought always thinking it was a bit of a silly thing to say given that nobody has lived for 400 years!

However it also turns out not really to be true. According to the Woodbridge School website the Seckford Foundation’s involvement in Woodbridge School actually began in 1861. Just over 150 years ago.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the cramped School building was proving inadequate and in 1861 the School integrated with the Seckford Trust, an almshouse charity, becoming a part beneficiary of an endowment left to the town of Woodbridge in 1587 by Thomas Seckford, Master of the Court of Requests to Queen Elizabeth I. 

It is interesting to read a bit of the history of the school which in fact opened its doors as The Free School, Woodbridge in 1577

At the end of the eighteenth century the school is described as:

Sir John Leman who actually did found
a school

Sounds very much like the “vision” for their new free schools….And if you hanker back to 1796 remember slavery had not been abolished then, hardly anyone had the vote and most children worked rather than went to school!

The Governors of the present Sir John Leman Academy School have a better claim to be the successors of the original Free School in Beccles founded with a legacy in Sir John Leman's will and opened in 1631. At least Sir John Leman actually did found a school!

Does any of this really matter? Not really but if you are going to start bragging that you have done something for hundreds of years it makes a start to get your facts right!