Marlborough School (Woodstock)

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The Marlborough School (not to be confused with Marlborough College, the Wiltshire public school) is a co-educational Church of England comprehensive school serving the historic Oxfordshire market town of Woodstock and its surrounding villages. The school takes its name from the Duke of Marlborough whose ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, also the birthplace of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, is in Woodstock. The school currently enrolls over a thousand pupils and its head teacher is Mrs. Julie Fenn. The school is approximately six miles from the City of Oxford. The school is known for its innovation and is ranked by The Times as a top state school.

[edit] Recent History

Although Chaucer once taught at a school in Woodstock, The Marlborough School was inaugurated in 1939 by the Lord Bishop of Dorchester. Until the educational reforms of the 1970s Marlborough was a grammar school.

The late 1930s were not auspicious times to embark on a school building program and the original building now known as the "main block" is not built to high standards. The main block was supplemented by a pre-fabricated [when?] second world war army barracks which at various times has been used to teach home-economics and as a sixth form block.

A second wave of brick buildings in the 1960s^{[citation needed]} included a sixth form and technology block, science laboratories a music block, library and canteen. The school suffered particularly badly from the underfunding of English state education in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite a huge increase in the school role no new buildings were built from the 1970s to the late 1990s except a sports hall. There was however a great proliferation of temporary classrooms. English, foreign language and some science lessons were taught in badly heated porta-cabins until the third wave of building started in 1997. In the early part of the 21st century a forth wave of building brought new language mathematics and sixth form blocks to supplement the existing modern-style science and music wings and the sports hall. The school has extensive sports fields.

From the 1970s through to the 1990s, the school had a reputation as a socialist's "comprehensive comprehensive," with a focus on teaching "how to learn" and "how to socialise" (which it did with varying degrees of success) rather than training pupils for exams. Former headmaster, Mr. Jerry O'Hagan, could have been said to have been ahead of his time when he favoured CSEs over GSE '0' level exams as he preferred to emphasise cumulative and cooperative learning for pupils over competition; the two examinations have since been combined to form the modern GCSE. In recent years The Marlborough School has pretty much thrown off that progressive reputation, possibly because it is less popular with the increasingly middle class local population. The last cohort of local children - whose ancestors had lived in the villages for many generations - probably passed through the school in the late 1990s. Nonetheless, throughout its history, the school has had a strong sixth form programme whose pupils have attended some of the country's top universities.

Exam results are now excellent, particularly by the standards of local education authority controlled schools. In 2005 and 2006, the school made The Times Parent Power Top State Schools list.

In 2006, plans were unveiled for a new £1m multi-purpose school building with a theatre, cinema and conference venue proposed as future uses. Pupils will help design the new centre (see related news story).

[edit] Ormerod Unit

A particular feature of the school is an embedded unit from the Ormerod school which allows children in Oxfordshire with disabilities to be educated in a mainstream secondary school.