Culford School

Culford School was founded in 1881 as a Methodist boys' boarding school by the Methodist Conference, then operating under the name "East Anglian School" in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. The school relocated in 1935 to its present 480-acre rural campus at Culford Hall, a Grade II listed Georgian country house built in the 1790s for the 1st Marquess Cornwallis (the British general who surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781, ending the American War of Independence). The Cornwallis family connection means the school's archives hold significant Cornwallis-related materials from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The school became co-educational in 1972 and today educates around 895 pupils ages 1-18 with a substantial boarding population. The Headmaster is Iain MacGregor. The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association, with a continuing Methodist foundation through the Methodist Independent Schools Trust.

Culford's principal distinctive co-curricular offering is tennis: the Culford Tennis Academy is the largest school-based tennis programme of the Lawn Tennis Association in the United Kingdom, with a high-performance academy operating in parallel with the academic school. The Academy has produced two of the leading British tennis players of the contemporary era: the sibling pair Naomi Broady and Liam Broady, both Wimbledon main-draw competitors, with Liam reaching British No. 2 and the Wimbledon third round multiple times. The on-campus tennis facilities — indoor and outdoor courts at all surfaces — are unusually substantial for a UK independent school.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Methodist Independent Schools Trust.