Oldbury Wells School

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Oldbury Wells School is a comprehensive school in Bridgnorth, England. The 2003 Ofsted inspection lists the school as having 1,034 pupils, 224 of whom are in the sixth form. The school's motto is "Towards Excellence."

1 History
2 Awards and accolades
3 External links

[edit] History

The buildings in which Oldbury Wells School is today based were originally two separate schools. What is now known as the East Side was opened as Bridgnorth Boys’ Modern School in 1958; the West Side opened as Bridgnorth Girls’ Modern School in 1959. The two schools merged to form Oldbury Wells during 1973/4. This gives the school its somewhat unusual characteristic of being split over two sites, albeit next door to one another and only separated by a small cul-de-sac road. Gymnasium facilities for the separate sexes still remain on their original designated sites; east for the boys and west for the girls.

The first headmaster of the school was Ben Unitt, who had previously been headmaster of the Boys' School. Following his retirement in 1981, Roger Davies, took over as headmaster. Davies retired at the end of the 2005/6 academic year. He was replaced by Sarah Godden, previously Deputy Head at Colton Hills School in Wolverhampton.

The school's intake covers a wide and mostly rural geographic area around the Severn Valley, and has the notable statistic that more than three-quarters of the pupils are bussed in from smaller villages ^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Awards and accolades

The school's buildings were listed during the 1990s. They were deemed to be of historical interest because of the way the concrete displays the grain of the wood shuttering into which it was poured.

In recognition of its high performance, the school was awarded beacon school status in 1998, although this programme has now been phased out nationally.

It became a science college in 2003, which sees it gain extra funding in return for developing its science facilities and teaching for the benefit of both its pupils and the wider community.

Students from the school have twice won the Schools Aerospace Challenge.

In 2002, one of the teaching staff, Alison Pearson, won the BP award for Science Year in recognition of the quality of her science teaching.