Fortismere School

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Fortismere School is a mixed, community comprehensive secondary school in Muswell Hill, London, United Kingdom. It falls under the London Borough of Haringey Local Education Authority. The school is situated on an extensive site a little west of the town centre, with main entrances on Tetherdown (South Wing) and Creighton Avenue (North Wing).

[edit] History

The first school on the site was Tollington School, a private boys' school. After World War II, this became a state grammar school and the attached preparatory school became Tetherdown Primary School (this moved from the site in 1958 when it exchanged premises with the girls' grammar school). In the 1950s William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School opened on an adjoining site in Creighton Avenue. With the introduction of comprehensive education in Haringey in 1967, Tollington Grammar School and William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School were merged to form Creighton School.

In the early 1970s, Creighton school was to become the centrepiece of a Labour Party education experiment. Situated in the middle class extensibly white suburb of Muswell Hill it was decided to integrate a large number of Afro-Caribbean and other ethnic minority children into the school from distant parts of the borough in an attempt to maximise education choice and social interaction - a policy based heavily on the then United States system of Desegregation busing. The school principal who was charged with overseeing this experiment was Molly Hattersley, the wife of Labour Party minister Roy Hattersley.As a part of the debate about comprehensive schools, Creighton school became the subject of a series of articles in the Sunday Times and a subsequent book by Hunter Davies, "The Creighton Report".

After further reorganization, Creighton School and another comprehensive, Alexandra Park School, were combined under the new name of Fortismere School. It opened in September 1983 and gained technology college status in 1997: this status has been extended to 2007. The school is now one of the most successful comprehensive schools in North London. Parts of the film Fever Pitch were shot at the school, and in 2006 it was featured in the BBC2 documentary, Don't Mess With Miss Beckles, in which under-achieving pupils were given a chance to reform.