Tewkesbury School

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Tewkesbury School is a comprehensive school in the English town of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. The current Head Teacher is John Reilly.

The school was the product of the decision taken c.1969 to make Tewkesbury switch to Comprehensive secondary education, the first town in Gloucestershire to do so.

Formerly Tewkesbury had had four secondary schools: the Grammar School for Boys, located at Southwick Park to the south of the town (now the Severn-Trent Water Authority's premises); the Grammar School for Girls, known as the "High School", in Church Street (now the Abbey School); the Secondary Modern School for Boys in Chance Street (now the C of E Primary School); and Elmbury Secondary Modern School for Girls, a modern premises on the Ashchurch Road. It was the latter whose buildings were chosen to form the nucleus of a new Tewkesbury Comprehensive School, with all of the town's secondary education being concentrated on the one site, and the former schools closing. After a major building programme in which a whole range of new structures was erected, enlarging the old Elmbury School to several times its original size, the new Comprehensive, known simply as Tewkesbury School, was opened on Tuesday 5th September 1972 with about 1,200 pupils on its books, and John Faull as its first Head Teacher.

A couple of months later, on Thursday 16 November 1972, the Official Opening took place, performed by Professor Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994), Chancellor of Bristol University from 1970 till 1988, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 and the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1976. In 1965 she became only the second woman (after Florence Nightingale), to be appointed to the Order of Merit, following the death of Sir Winston Churchill.

At some stage the school gained some distinction when Queen Elizabeth II visited the school after taking a tour of the town. She inspected some of the pupils and ate her lunch in the gym hall.

The school website can be found here.