Welcome to the Freemantles School website

Thank you for visiting our school website. We hope that, for whatever reason you are here, you find it easy to navigate to the information that you require.

We are exceptionally proud of Freemantles and all of the work that it does. Our most recent OFSTED inspection, in November 2023, upheld our Outstanding grading across all areas.

We are currently a Surrey County Council maintained school for children and young people with complex social communication needs, usually including a diagnosis of Autism, and have developed a renowned understanding and specialism in this area.

The school supports children from 4-19 years old and has a wide catchment area which covers most of Surrey, but mainly the West. The school opened on its current Mayford site in 2007 designed to be able to accommodate a single cohort of pupils in each year group with a maximum of 9 pupils per class.

Since 2017 Freemantles has been expanding, and from Sept 2025 we will have 2 cohorts or classes in all year groups between year R and year 11, with a total number of 243 pupils on roll at the Mayford site. The governing body and the leadership team at Freemantles have worked with Surrey County Council to become two form entry across the whole Mayford site. To achieve this aim, have had a Secondary and FE building constructed, which opened in November 2023, and all work completed and facilities available for use from March 2025.

The new building has some wonderful facilities that will enable us to further enhance our incredible offer for our Secondary and FE pupils. 

Furthermore, in January 2024, we opened a temporary 3-year Satellite site at Ripley for cohorts of infant children. Upon opening we were supporting 18 children, this grew in Sept 2024 to 36 children and will grow again in September 2025 to 45. This brings the total number of children across all sites to 297. Again, we worked with Surrey to ensure that the facilities at this site were at least as good as those at the Mayford site through significant refurbishing, and children are regularly accessing facilities at the Mayford site.

We also enhanced the offer and facilities in the Primary School in Mayford in the Summer of 2024, and this will be completed in Summer 2025.

A major priority throughout all of the expansion work is to ensure that we are able to offer the same excellent quality of education for all of the pupils at all times. Therefore, ensuring that we maintain and continue to improve our standards is crucial and highlighted as a key part of our Freemantles Development Plan. There is a requirement that there is sufficient outdoor space and space for emotional well-being, consistent with our School Mission, for all pupils and staff.

As we continue to expand, we also want to focus on ensuring that parents and families are well supported and have opportunities to build close relationships with school staff.  Our leadership team is therefore structured with an Executive Headteacher, who has oversight of both schools and the strategic development of Freemantles, with a Head of Schools and two Deputies that also have whole school responsibilities. Assistant Headteachers are based within the different schools (Secondary & FE, Ripley and Primary). This ensures that all parents have confidence that senior leaders know their child well, can build strong relationships with the child and parents, as well as really discussing their needs.  

The Governors and Leadership team at Freemantles have always expressed a commitment to supporting all pupils with Autism in Surrey. As a result, we have a very well established and highly reputed community support role which includes outreach, training and High COIN Centre Support.

The effectiveness of the Autism Outreach offer over the last 10 years, coordinated by Freemantles, has led to Surrey investing more to expand this offer. They have changed to model to commission the Surrey Autism Outreach for Schools from Freemantles School, who have the role of leading the new service, quality assuring and reporting back on its success. We work with two partner schools to deliver this service, Woodlands and Limpsfield Grange. Referrals into the Outreach service need to come from schools.

In addition, the Freemantles Outreach team are commissioned by Surrey to deliver

• STEPS – a package of support into Early years settings
• Supporting Inclusion for Autism (SIFA) an intensive programme of Outreach support for situations where this is needed.
• High COIN Centre Support – helping new centres to set up and run effectively
• Coordination and quality assurance of Parent training: Cygnet is now up and running and two further programmes will be offered from September 2025.

Details of these services are available here: https://www.autismoutreachforschools.uk

We offer an extensive range of training, which is appropriate for parents (both Freemantles and non Freemantles) and professionals. This develops a deeper understanding of the challenges of living with Autism in a ‘neurotypical’ world and how we all have a role to play in helping our children to make progress in all areas of their personal and academic growth.

Freemantles has successfully worked in Partnership with the Bourne Education Trust to support them to deliver the new High COIN Free school, Hopescourt, which Surrey identified the need for. This is currently open in temporary buildings whilst the new build is under construction. Freemantles is now an associate of the Bourne Education Trust with a view to joining in the next years.

I hope that you found this introduction to our school community informative. Further detail about the key aspects of our work can be found by following the links in the text above. Please get in touch if you have anything that you would like to feedback to us about the website, we really value your views and opinions.

Justin Price

Executive Headteacher