Stanwell School

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Stanwell School
Motto Goreu arf, arf dysg
"The best weapon, is the weapon of knowledge"
Established 1897
Type Foundation status Comprehensive
Religious affiliation Secular and non denominational
Headteacher Mr Malcolm Parker BSc MEd
Chair of Governors Mr A Rabaiotti
Founder Earl of Plymouth
Specialism Sixth Form College
Location Archer Road
Penarth
Vale of Glamorgan
CF64 2XL
Flag of Wales Wales
Staff 96
Students 1,600
Gender Co-educational
Ages 11 to 18
School colours Navy Blue

    
Former Pupils Old Penarthians
Website Stanwell School Website

Stanwell School is a popular, oversubscribed co-educational comprehensive school and Sixth form college located in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales for children aged between eleven and eighteen .

The school currently has approximately 1,600 pupils on the roll in years seven to thirteen with a thriving sixth form. The school benefits from excellent facilities, with all the school's buildings either newly built or recently re-furbished.

Specialist teaching accommodation has been provided for Science (featuring eleven modern laboratories), drama, music, media studies, P.E. (including sports halls and a substantial playing field), Information Technology, Art and Design Technology

Stanwell School was previously Penarth County Grammar School prior to becoming a comprehensive.

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] A Victorian beginning

The school originally opened in 1897 as Penarth Grammar School during the rapid Victorian expansion of the Penarth, Cogan, Llandough and Dinas Powys areas following the building of Cardiff and Penarth docks to handle the burgeoning South Wales coal trade. Between 1891 and 1901 the population of the town expanded from 12,000 to over 15,000 people and the need for a new school was paramount.

Unusually the school was established for both boys and girls at a time when most British grammar schools were single sex establishments and few girls were even expected to complete a grammar school education. However, within the school the sexes remained segregated during the working day with separate school entrances, classrooms, teaching staff and playground areas.

Initially the only buildings on the site were the original school building that still stands, facing onto Archer Road, the headmaster’s private residence on the corner of Archer and Stanwell roads (later used as a home by the resident caretaker) and a small chapel building that was later converted into a physics laboratory during the 1940s.

[edit] Into the 20th Century

Penarth's town rugby pitch had been dug up and used for growing vegetables by local residents during First World War food shortages, so between 1919 and 1924 the traditional annual Good Friday rugby matches between Penarth RFC and the Barbarians [1] were staged instead on the grammar school's playing field, when most of the town's population turned up to watch and cheer. In the autumn of 1924 the new Athletic Ground on Lavernock Road, a gift to the town by the Earl of Plymouth, was opened and the Good Friday matches were moved to their new home the following year.

In the late 1950s the previously segregated sexes were combined into a co-educational school that was renamed as Penarth County Grammar School but the increasing school population had far expanded beyond the available accommodation and a large number of temporary portacabin buildings were added and increasingly built across the original playgrounds and playing fields. These temporary buildings included a gymnasium, chemistry and biology laboratories, domestic science (now food technology) kitchen, woodwork and metalwork shops, several ranges of classrooms and a toilet block. Originally planned to last no longer than ten years, many of the temporary buildings remained in use well into the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1965 seventeen and eighteen year old six formers were finally given permission to drive their own cars or motorbikes to school for the first time, although there was no school car park and cars were parked on the roadside in Archer Road. The first pocket sized calculators started appearing in the school during the early 1970s, [2] manufactured by Clive Sinclair although in the early years they could only be afforded by some students as they cost £99.99 (£550 in today's terms) and their use was not allowed during lessons or exams until several years later, by which time cheap imported Japanese copies had brought the prices down.

In 1971 the local authority funded the building of a new youth club on the school site, near the Stanwell Road side entrance, called Penarth Youth Wing and the facility was utilized by the school during the day as additional accommodation for music and drama classes. In 1981 the school was the first in the area to take delivery of a computer, an Acorn BBC micro with 16 Kilobytes of user RAM, a CPU speed of 2 MHz and 32 Kilobytes of ROM storage (but no hard drive). All programs had to be written by the children in the BASIC computer language and stored on cassette tapes as there was no commercial software provided with the machine.

[edit] Recent Developments

Entry to the school in the early years had been by Eleven plus examination with only those pupils that achieved the highest scores in the area's feeder schools being accepted. However in the late 1960s a Labour government led educational reform, through several ministerial directives and eventually the Education Reform Act 1968, [3] that was accepted and implemented by the education authority, scrapped the 11+ examination and with it the segregated tripartite strata of grammar, technical grammar and secondary modern schools. In 1973 the school became a co-educational comprehensive and renamed as Stanwell School.

Between 1990 and 1998 Stanwell was a grant maintained school [4] operating under direct government funding and effecting its own student selection process, outside the normal procedures of the local education authority. It was during this period of grant maintained status that the vast amount of cash investment was injected into providing new school buildings and the superb teaching environment that can be seen today. The grant maintained system ceased in 1998 under the new Labour government and Stanwell School now has foundation status within the education authority but with autonomous school governors controlling admissions to the school, employing the school's staff and owning the school's estate.

[edit] The school today

[edit] Vision Statement

An imaginative and inspired use has been made of the school’s postcode “2XL” by the school’s vision statement of “Learning to Excel”. Stanwell school remains clearly focused on learning and excellence as defined by “improving on your previous best”. Many aspects of the school’s educational standards have been recognised nationally, through awards, as areas of good practice.

[edit] Catchment

Most pupils transfer at age eleven from one of the four main partner primary schools: Albert Road Primary, Evenlode Primary, Victoria Primary and Sully Primary. The first three schools being within a walking distance and designated buses transporting the pupils from nearby Sully. Pupils are drawn from the full range of abilities although the majority of pupils are of average ability and above. Only three pupils have statements of special educational needs (SEN) and a further 143 have been identified as having particular needs.

Addionally pupils come from a wide range of social circumstances. The school feels that half as are neither prosperous nor disadvantaged, with half equally divided between the other two extremes. Only six per cent of pupils are registered as entitled to free school meals, which is lower than both local and national averages. Few pupils come from ethnic heritages or have a language other than English as their first language. Very few (less than 1 percent) pupils speak Welsh as a first language or to an equivalent standard. Welsh is taught and examined as a second language only. No pupils currently receive support teaching in English as an additional language.

[edit] Sixth Form and beyond

At sixteen years of age, most pupils choose to remain at the school to continue with their studies in the sixth form and the majority of these subsequently enter college or university higher education. There are currently around 300 pupils undergoing sixth form education.

[edit] Most recent ESTYN inspection

Estyn is the office of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Education and Training in Wales. The most recent ESTYN school inspection report records:

• There has been a considerable improvement on the results achieved at the time of the previous inspection.

• The school’s success in GCSE examinations for grades A* to G is better than that achieved locally, nationally and in the unitary authority overall.

• In the KS3 national tests, success at level 6 and above exceeds national and local averages.

• The pupils’ very good literacy and communication skills are used to very good effect in most subjects.

• Pupils use their very good information and communication technology skills advantageously in most subjects. They often choose to do so independently and appropriately.

• All pupils are challenged suitably and achieve very well in the majority of subjects.

• Based upon pupils’ prior attainment, the school’s results in external examinations exceed expectations at every level.

[edit] School Badge

The school badge represents the coat of arms of Robert Windsor-Clive, 1st Earl of Plymouth.

[edit] Notable Alumni



  • Samuel George Pearse VC, MM, (16 July 1897 – 29 August 1919) - was a Sergeant in the Royal Fusiliers and a recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces. Pearse was born in Penarth and educated at Penarth Grammar School before moving to Australia with his family in 1911 after leaving school.


  • Patrick Gibbs (Born 1916 - Died April 2008) , was born in Penarth, attended Penarth Grammar School and died aged 92 best remembered as chief film critic of the Daily Telegraph from 1960 to 1986. But his own most dramatic moment came when he was a Royal Air Force Wing Commander based on Malta for three months during the summer of 1942 as a flight commander at the much-bombed but resilient island, which moved his flight of Beaufort torpedo bombers within range of Axis convoys crossing the Mediterranean to Africa. Gibbs was awarded the DSO, DFC and Bar .



  • Colin McCormack (born December 1941 - died 19 June 2004) - Actor and member of the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company, famous for his stage, television and film roles over fifty years including Macbeth (1988), The Tempest (1988), Two Gentlemen Of Verona (1999) and Julius Caesar (2002). He was also in the RSC's production of A Clockwork Orange (1990). His TV roles were numerous but included Dixon Of Dock Green (1955 and 1974), Z Cars (1966), Please, Sir (1970), The Sweeney (1975), The Good Life (1978), Yes Minister (1980), Martin Chuzzlewit (1994), Inspector Morse (1987), Casualty (2000) and Longitude (2000). He appeared in several films the latest ones being Let Him Have It (1991) and First Knight (1995). Colin will probably best be remembered by television audiences for his recurring role as Alan in the 1984 science fiction series Chocky and his 1991 stint playing Kevin Masters in Eastenders. He also tutored at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and his students included Ewan McGregor, Alistair McGowan and Daniel Craig. Colin died of cancer aged 63. He was born in Penarth and attended Penarth Grammar School. [6]



  • Jemma Griffiths (Born 18 June 1975) - is a singer-songwriter better known as Jem. She was born in Penarth where she attended Stanwell School and went on to attend Sussex University, obtaining a degree in law. Along with Guy Sigsworth, she wrote the song "Nothing Fails", which was later reworked by Madonna and appeared on her 2003 American Life album.


  • Amanda Haswell - the Welsh Commonwealth and British Olympic high diver in the 1960s was born in Penarth and attended Penarth Grammar School.

[edit] References

  1. ^ BaBa History
  2. ^ Sinclair Calculator
  3. ^ Education Reform Act
  4. ^ Grant maintained
  5. ^ John Smith at Theyworkforyou
  6. ^ Colin McCormack obituary
  7. ^ Steve Parr at IMDB
  8. ^ Hear No Evil Studio, London
  9. ^ Steve Parr at Studio Expresso

[edit] See Also

Coordinates: 51°25′59.48″N, 03°10′58.33″W