Hills students win The Bill Tutte Alborada Scholarship!

Since 2014, The Bill Tutte Alborada Scholarship has supported 17 gifted young people who are studying mathematics or computer science at university. Each candidate receives £1,000 a year over the course of a three-year degree.

The scholarship was created, and named, in honour of Bill Tutte, a Newmarket-born wartime codebreaking genius, who is credited with shortening WWII by at least two years by cracking Hitler’s most secret cipher.

Bill was born into humble means, in which his father was a gardener and his mother a housekeeper at Fitzroy House. He was educated at Cheveley Primary School where he won a scholarship to Cambridge High School for Boys, which later became Hills Road Sixth Form College.

Sophie, like Bill, was a pupil at Cheveley Primary School, who after completing her GCSE’s at Bottisham Village College came to Hills Road in 2021 to study Maths, Further Maths, Psychology and History (Crisis, Conflict and Communism). Now, Sophie has gone to the University of Edinburgh to study maths.

Sophie will be following in her parents' footsteps, who both studied at the university, as well as her great aunt, Patricia Hiddleston, who graduated in 1956 and became the first woman to be awarded the coveted Napier Medal for mathematics.

Archie, who went to Soham Village College to study his GCSE’s, excelled at his A levels at Hills Road, where he studied Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Spanish. He is now at the University of Warwick studying maths.

Principal, Jo Trump said: “We are really proud of these two young people and their exceptional maths aptitude and achievement. We have a long and distinguished history of excellence in maths provision here at the College and are also proud that Bill Tutte is an old boy of the former grammar school that was the predecessor of the current Hills Road. It is lovely to carry on this tradition of mathematical excellence and we look forward to Sophie and Archie following in Bill’s incredible footsteps in the future.”

We wish both Archie and Sophie the very best of luck at university and congratulate them on this amazing achievement. The support they’ll receive from The Bill Tutte Alborada Scholarship, will surely be invaluable.