Winshill: Education

Education

There was a day school attended by 13 boys and 9 girls in 1833; it also met on Sundays. (fn. 1) A National school was built in Berry Hedge Lane in 1846, and by 1871 it had an attendance of 56 boys and 50 girls. In 1874 it was vested by the vicar of Winshill (as the sole manager) in the school board district established for the Burton area in 1873. (fn. 2) The building was retained for boys when the board in 1874 opened a school for girls and infants in the angle of Church Hill Street and Hawfield Lane. (fn. 3) The school remained an all-age school probably until the later 1930s, when seniors were transferred to Hill Street school, in Stapenhill. The Berry Hedge Lane building was vacated and later became a community centre, still its use in 1999.

The Joseph Clark county primary school was opened on a site off Vancouver Drive in 1954. (fn. 4) It became a junior school in 1963 when the adjacent High Bank infants' school was opened on the same site. The two schools were merged in 1996 as the present Tower View primary school. (fn. 5) The Roman Catholic Holy Rosary primary school at the west end of Alexandra Road was opened in 1965 (fn. 6) and Bend Oak junior school in Brough Road in 1970. (fn. 7)

In 1928 Burton girls' high school was moved to Winshill, to a site formerly belonging to a house called the Woodlands, on the east side of Newton Road; the new school was approached from Osborne Street. (fn. 8) Burton boys' grammar school was also moved to Winshill in 1957 to a site on the south side of Mill Hill Lane, (fn. 9) and in 1968 the Ada Chadwick secondary modern school was opened to the west. (fn. 10) In 1975 the three schools were amalgamated as Abbot Beyne comprehensive school. (fn. 11) The former secondary school building was demolished in 1992 because of structural weakness, but the other two school buildings continued to be used in 1999, the Woodlands as a sixth-form centre.

In 1829 Clara Bailey ran a girls' boarding school at a house called Bladon Hill north of the corn mills; there were 12 pupils in 1833 and 19 in 1841. Her daughters Emma and Marian continued to run it in 1851. (fn. 12) A private day school opened in Rosemount Street by 1888 was still there in 1900, but had moved by 1904 to nearby premises in Scalpcliff Road, in Stapenhill. (fn. 13)