Welcome to St Mary’s School based in Horam, near Heathfield, East Sussex. I do hope that you find the website both useful and easy to navigate. The school celebrated an outstanding judgement from OfSTED in November 2011.

St Mary’s works closely with its federated school, Cuckmere House School, Seaford, with whom it shares a single governing body. There is also a formal collaboration with New Horizons (Hastings) and College Central (East Sussex, Countywide). While each school has an individual Head of School, all four schools share an Executive Headteacher; Mr. Frank Stanford.

The report from OfSTED states ‘St Mary’s is an outstanding school that has undergone a rapid period of improvement under the guidance of the Executive Headteacher, the Head of School and an enthusiastic and committed school team’.

This has certainly been endorsed by the range of improvements to the schools and the resulting accolades over the past two years. The school received its first of its successive three “Outstanding” judgements for the residential provision in February 2010. This was followed up by the successful bid for Specialist Schools status from the Government in September 2010, its specialism being Behaviour and Cognitive learning. By February 2011 the second outstanding judgement for the NEST (the residential facility) was awarded. Finally the end of 2011 culminated in the integrated inspection of November 2011, with the resulting outstanding judgement for the school as a whole.

Whilst St Mary’s enjoys ongoing success, the journey for the school is still very much continuing and the final destination not yet reached. I hope the website gives you a flavour of what St Mary’s is all about, and if you have any queries or comments we would be delighted to hear from you.