St Peter's Catholic Comprehensive School
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St Peter's Catholic Comprehensive School is run under the joint trusteeship of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portsmouth and a religious order of teachers, the De La Salle Brothers.The school, at present, has been mastered by Mr Anthony McCaffrey MA, the first non-religious headmaster, since 1992. The school operates from two sites in Bournemouth. The Lower School from Holdenhurst Avenue, Iford, and the Upper School from St Catherine's Road, Southbourne.
St Peter's has achieved both the drama and sports specialist school status.
[edit] History of the School
St Peter's was originally opened as a boys' boarding school on the 29 September 1936 with a total of 34 boys. Father Bellanti was the first headmaster and the school was run by Jesuit priests.
This continued until the summer of 1947 when, due to other commitments, the school was handed over to the De La Salle brothers. The last Jesuit community consisted of nine fathers and two brothers. One of the Jesuit priests who was a housemaster at St Peters was Fr. Gerard Hughes S.J., the author of the best selling religious book "God of Surprises" in which he observed St Peter's boys were "affable and undemanding".
From the time of the first De la Salle headmaster, Brother Bernard Brady in 1947, until the last, Brother Bernard Hayward in 1993, the De la Salle brothers improved, enlarged and ran the schoo. Many of its staff had PhDs and it featured often in the Guinness Book of Records for its GCE results.[citation needed] In 1973 it sent nearly 14% of its sixth form to Oxford and Cambridge. At the same time its performances and production of Gilbert and Sullivan operas were reviewed in the local press as being easily of "professional class".[citation needed] Under the headmastership of Brother Alan Maurice, the school became a member of the HMC association of public schools pursuing an unashamedly but tolerant elitist ethos. In keeping with this image boaters were allowed to be worn by sixth formers.
The reorganisation of local education and the changes wrought by the Labour government in 1974 offered the opportunity for the school to examine whether it might serve the interests of the wider Catholic community in Bournemouth by becoming non selective. The community discussed at length the options open to it; finally reaching the conclusion that their founder St John Baptiste de la Salle had been motivated above all by the desire to widen educational opportunities for those who could not afford it.[citation needed]
It was therefore during this time that they oversaw the integration of the combining of the St Peter's, the St Thomas More and the Boscombe Convent schools. The notice of intent was published on the 13 October 1978.
To this day it remains one of the very few schools in England to have successfully navigated the transition from an elite selective fee-paying establishment to a comprehensive school.
