Laisterdyke High School

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Laisterdyke School is a secondary school and sixth form for boys and girls in Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK. The age range of the pupils is 11-18. The school currently holds Business and Enterprise status, and also uses the name "Laisterdyke Business and Enterprise College".

Following the re-organisation of education in the local education authority (LEA) in September 1999 the school changed from a middle school for pupils aged 8 to 13 to its current designation. The school is oversubscribed and continuing to grow. In September 2002, the school admitted its first cohort of sixth form students and became an 11 to 18 school.

A high proportion of pupils (almost 80 per cent) are from ethnic minority backgrounds and almost all have English as an additional language. Most pupils come from Pakistani backgrounds with smaller numbers from Indian and Bangladeshi backgrounds. Other than English, the main languages spoken are Urdu, Punjabi, Pushto and Hindi.

As part of their upgrade and new building development, the school has invested in ICT facilities for pupils, staff and surrounding schools.^[1]

The school has won a Schools Drug Prevention Charter Award for its efforts in anti-drug education icarried out jointly with local units of the Rotary Club and the Soroptomists Club of Great Britain, as well as with the Bradford Bulls rugby club.^[2]

In December 2006, a delegation of educational professionals led by the University of Bradford travelled to Pakistan for a five-day International Education Conference. Representatives from Laisterdyke school were amongst the delegates. The conference was organised following the publication of a report entitled The Mirpur Connection in July 2006. One of its recommendations was to organise an International Educational Conference including practical workshops for teachers, children and young people.^[3] The purpose of that visit was to forge links between schools, colleges and Universities in Mirpur and Bradford and to provide a co-ordinated platform for close collaboration between organisations in the Bradford district and those in Mirpur.

Mirpur is important to many British Muslim communities in West Yorkshire because of the strong social and cultural ties between the communities. These ties began in the 1960s when the families of many Bradford citizens migrated to the region, mainly because of the development of the Mangla Dam, which flooded 485 villages in the 60s making 100,000 people homeless.