SCHOOLS

No record of a medieval school in Aston has survived, but it would be strange indeed if the clergy of so large a parish had failed to provide education for the favoured few. In 1739 a small house at the end of the vicarage barn was said to have been in use as a school. From 1846 to 1889 St. Stephen's Church in Newtown Row had its own (National) school, but this was across the brook in Birmingham Parish and may not have accepted Aston pupils. In 1850 St. Mary's Convent started a girls' school in Brougham Street, and one for boys off Willis Street nine years later.
St. Silas's Aston Villa mission opened a school in 1852. St. Mary's Aston Brook school began in 1860 and continued in a new building in Whitehouse Street from 1868. There was an undenominational school, maintained by subscription, in Cower Street, 1862-76. The Wesleyan school on Victoria Road was built in 1870, year of the first Education Act, following which the Aston School Board was elected to provide places for all children aged 5 to 11 in the parish outside Birmingham. Its offices were in Albert Road from 1881, alongside the Board School.

In this essay we shall look only at Aston Manor schools. Temporary ones were opened in converted buildings at Aston Villa and Yates Street. Cower Street school was first to be transferred to the Board in 1876, when the Aston Institute for adult education was opened in a Park Road schoolroom: there was never an Institute building like those built by private benefaction elsewhere. Four Board schools, each for more than a thousand children, were opened two years later - Upper Thomas Street, Burlington and Alma Streets, and Vicarage Road. Albert Road followed in 1881 and Lozells Street the next year.

There was much addition and rebuilding at church schools. In 1883 King Edward VI Foundation opened King Edward VI Grammar School, Aston on a site between Victoria and Frederick Roads. The Wesleyan School was transferred to the Board the following year and closed in 1886, when Alfred Street National School became an annexe of the new Aston Lane Board School. Another Wesleyan school opened in Lichfield Road in 1892. Two years later Anglesey Street and Station Road Board Schools commenced work, and the Sacred Heart R.C. School followed in 1898.

Meanwhile in 1893 the Higher Elementary Schools had been built in red terra-cotta and brick on Whitehead/Ettington Roads corner. Seven years later the flamboyant yellow terra-cotta building on the opposite corner was opened as an annexe to Albert Road Higher Grade School. It had a Pupil Teachers' block alongside, still so labelled, that was later used as a school for deaf children. From 1915 the two main buildings housed Commercial and Technical Schools.

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