Fairfield High School is a specialist Arts College

Arts College

Arts Colleges were introduced in 1997 as part of the now defunct Specialist Schools Programme in the United Kingdom. The system enabled secondary schools to specialise in certain fields, in this case, the performing, visual and/or media arts...

 in Hereford

Hereford

Hereford is a cathedral city, civil parish and county town of Herefordshire, England. It lies on the River Wye, approximately east of the border with Wales, southwest of Worcester, and northwest of Gloucester...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

.

Overview

Fairfield High School, Peterchurch

Peterchurch

Peterchurch is a village and civil parish in the Golden Valley, Herefordshire, England, which has a Norman church, dedicated to St. Peter, built on the unusual basilica model with four, rather than three chambers. The church's foundations are thought to go back to 786, and parts of the Saxon walls...

, Herefordshire

Herefordshire

Herefordshire is a historic and ceremonial county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire" NUTS 2 region. It also forms a unitary district known as the...

. Heavily oversubscribed, it is one of the top 10 schools in the country. In the June 2009 Ofsted inspection, the school received the best possible score in each category.

An unusually large number of animals are kept at the school, including alpaca

Alpaca

An alpaca is a domesticated species of South American camelid. It resembles a small llama in appearance.Alpacas are kept in herds that graze on the level heights of the Andes of southern Peru, northern Bolivia, Ecuador, and northern Chile at an altitude of to above sea level, throughout the year...

s, turtle

Turtle

Turtles are reptiles of the order Testudines , characterised by a special bony or cartilaginous shell developed from their ribs that acts as a shield...

s, reptile

Reptile

Reptiles are members of a class of air-breathing, ectothermic vertebrates which are characterized by laying shelled eggs , and having skin covered in scales and/or scutes. They are tetrapods, either having four limbs or being descended from four-limbed ancestors...

s and rabbit

Rabbit

Rabbits are small mammals in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha, found in several parts of the world...

s. Recently threatened with closure, along with many other schools in Herefordshire, to save costs, but after a demonstration, and immense opposition to the idea, the proposal was withdrawn. Fairfield offers a large number of additional courses and BTEC

Business And Technology Education Council (BTEC)

The Business and Technology Education Council is the British body which awards vocational qualifications. Such qualifications are commonly referred to as "BTECs"....

 courses to students. Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 and French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

are taught as additional languages.