Tewkesbury School

Story

Tewkesbury School is a secondary school in the English town of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. The Head Teacher is Gary Watson (commenced Headship in January 2012). On 1 January 2012, Tewkesbury School became an academy.HistoryThe school was the product of the decision taken in 1969 to make Tewkesbury switch to comprehensive secondary education.Formerly Tewkesbury had had four secondary schools: the Grammar School for Boys, located at Southwick Park to the south of the town (later offices of the Severn-Trent Water Authority's Lower Severn Division, after that Equinox Maintenance Limited and now Cambian Southwick Park School - a residential school for autistic pupils); the Grammar School for Girls, known as the "High School", in Church Street (later the Abbey School, now private premises under development); 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, opened in 1960. 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, enlarging the old Elmbury School to several times its original size, the new comprehensive, known as Tewkesbury School, was opened on 5 September 1972 with about 1,200 pupils on its books, and John C. 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 the University of Bristol from 1970 till 1988, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 and the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1976.