Kingsbury High School
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kingsbury High School is a High School in Kingsbury, London, United Kingdom. It currently takes on more than 300 pupils a year culminating in just under 2,000 students (including sixth form). The Upper School site at Princes Avenue, NW9 London, is recognisable to many adults now because it was used as the set for the one of the original series of the popular children's drama series Grange Hill. It is also notable because of its high exam results and is heavily over-subscribed.
[edit] History
The school started out as Kingsbury County School in a premises on the Edgware Road between Colindale and Edgware on 15 September 1925 but as the school roll increased a new school was built in Princes Avenue in 1929. The school then changed once again to become Kingsbury County Grammar School in 1944 as a result of legislation of the 1944 Education Act.
In 1952, two local secondary modern schools, Tyler's Croft Girls' and Boys', were opened on one site in Bacon Lane and were merged into one large school with Kingsbury County Grammar School in 1967. The London Borough of Brent (in which the school is located) had taken over responsibility for the school and reorganised all of its secondary schools as comprehensive schools. So in 1967 Kingsbury County Grammar school was amalgamated with the two secondary modern schools, Tylers Croft Secondary School for Boys and Tylers Croft Secondary for Girls and was renamed Kingsbury High School (KHS). The Tyler's building on Bacon Lane was to become the lower school (years 7–9) and the Kingsbury building on Stag Lane to become the upper school (years 10–13.)
The school, from then, has seen only cultural and technological differences. During the 1970s and 1980s, a large thriving and enterprising Asian community grew up in the Kingsbury area. As a result, the number of pupils increased to 1,750 and the proportion of ethnic minority children in the school increased.
The headmaster in the late 1980s to early 2000s was Phillip Snell who had a great interest in the potential of other learning resources. As a result, much money was invested in computing and the school rapidly gained a nationwide reputation for this. However the headmaster now is Mr C R Chung MA, NPQH. Most notably visit was when HRH Queen Elizabeth II chose the school to launch her Royal website in 2000. The school now has interactive whiteboards in many classrooms (with an aim to put one in every classroom).
The lower school is one large building whereas the upper school comprises six separate buildings: two pretty general, one a foreign languages block, one a science (upstairs) and technology (downstairs) block, one sports hall and one a canteen.
Up to 2003 Kingsbury High School, selected 15% of its new intake via a cognitive ability test, mainly focussing on verbal reasoning. However for the next academic year, the test was scrapped, and all new intake generally come from local feeder primary schools.
