From THE CITY OF OXFORD HIGH SCHOOL MAGAZINE VoL. LI,i DECEMBER 1958 no 164
School Notes
We wrote in our issue of July 1946:
“The Development Plan for Education in the City of Oxford has been promulgated and has been accepted by the Council and forwarded to the Minister. It is a sound framework for planning the future and has the merit of being detailed enough as a practical policy and flexible enough to be capable of further consideration. The misfortune for the School is that from being a No. 1 priority in 1939 we are relegated to the tenth year of an 18-year programme.”
The ‘ tenth year’ has come and gone and we are still in George Street, though we are still scheduled, as in 1946, to be transferred to new premises on our old site at Marston Ferry. The only modification of the 1946 scheme which has taken place in the intervening years has been the decision to make us a three-form entry school-a decision which has met with general approval.
Now, however, as a result of the vagaries of the birth-rate and the shifting of population, the Local Education Authority nas decided to examine, and revise, in the light of a decade’s experience, much of the original Development Plan. Our School, which now seems to be, according to the schedule, an equal-first’ priority with a proposed Secondary Modern School for North Oxford, again becomes the subject of discussion.
It is being suggested on the Education Committee that the ‘Tripartite Scheme’ of separate Grammar Schools, Technical Schools and Secondary Modern Schools of the original Development Plan should not be applied to this School; but that our new buildings on the Marston Ferry site should house besides Grammar School pupils a large number of Modern Secondary pupils in a Bilateral Educational Experiment.
Our School was originally an experiment and is still open to experiment and capable of experiment-of the right kind; but it is by no means certain that T. H. Green’s far-sighted move nearly 80 years ago – the prototype of a scheme of new Grammar High Schools – can be said to have finished. Has it not proved something of which the City should be proud and whose continuance should be jealousy watched?
For years the School has continued to develop and to expand and to adapt itself to new educational requirements, despite cramped quarters and deficient quantities of equipment. It has sent its pupils cycling two miles to their playing fields and a mile to their woodwork centre. It has transported non-swimmers three miles to the baths. Their dining room is the School Hall: their gymnasium is a borrowed hall totally lacking permanent equipment.
We are in favour of experiment: but surely the first experiment should be to discover what the School can achieve as a Grammar School in new premises designed to meet modern educational needs? And after that? There is plenty of room for experiment within the Grammar Schools-and plenty of need-if they are to do their own job and if they are to cater for the varied assortment of abilities of the type which the community has in the past required and is to-day requiring of them.