SCHOOLS

There was probably a school associated with St. John's Chapel and its gild, held in the Gild Hall, until the Dissolution. It has been claimed that the Golden Lion Inn, now in Cannon Hill Park, was the Gild Hall, but its timbering is Elizabethan. Nothing is known of education in Deritend and Bordesley until the foundation of a National (Anglican) School by Holy Trinity Church in 1825: six years later it moved into a new building of which it was said that the sun never shone into its rooms. St. John's National School opened in Chapel House Street in 1833, a new building being provided two decades later. The following year Holy Trinity School moved to the building which still stands on Trinity Terrace, in factory use. A Wesleyan School in Bradford Street was open in 1846 but closed thereafter. St. Anne's R.C. School began three years later in the distillery then used as a church. Christ Church's school started in a private house, moved to a borrowed sawmill, and in 1872 to a dismal building in Early English style which still stands on Stratford Road. St. Andrew's had an Infant School in Watery Lane, 1850-76, and an Elementary School in Little Green Lane, 1862-9.. St. Alban's School in Dymoke Street began in 1866.

After the 1870 Act, Birmingham School Board opened the following schools, each for about a thousand children, all designed by Martin & Chamberlain and nearly all built round an assembly hall:- Dixon Road 1870 (additions 1894, 1911), Garrison Lane 1873 (Additions 1878, 1886, 1912), Jenkins Street 1873 (additions 1898 1906, 1931), Allcock Street and Moseley Road both 1877, little Green Lane 1878, Montgomery Street 1879, Ada Road 1885 (1928), Stratford Road 1885 (1893-8), Upper Highgate Street 1888, Oakley Road 1889 (1959), Tilton Road 1891, Somerville Road 1894, Marlborough Road 1898, Conway Road 1900, Bordesley Green 1902. These were all six-grade schools for children from 5-11. In 1892 Waverley Road School was opened as a Higher Grade School, offering two years extra education; it was enlarged in 1906 by Birmingham Education Committee, which had opened Oldknow Road the year before and was to open St. Benedict's Road in 1913.

Waverley became a Secondary school in 1933 and a Grammar School following the 1945 Act. It is now Comprehensive, in new buildings off Hobmoor Road. The King Edward VI Foundation had started a branch school in Meriden Street. In 1881 it founded a girls' school in the Georgian White House on Camp Hill. A boys' school was built alongside two years later, and a new building for girls replaced the house in 1896. (There had earlier been a private school for girls at Stratford house). The only new school between the wars was Starbank, built for the children on Haybarnes municipal estate in 1927.

Of the church schools St. Alban's, Christ Church, and St. Anne's have been rebuilt on different sites, and St. Patrick's has been enlarged. All the rest are closed. Board Schools which have been demolished are Dixon Road, Little Green Lane, Upper Highgate Street, Moseley Road: the first two have been replaced by Regent Park and Wyndcliffe Primary Schools, and the last by Chandos in new buildings on Vaughton Street South. Calthorpe Special School and Education Centre occupy the Moseley Road site. Ada Road (St. Andrews's) and Conway are primary schools only, and Tilton is a temporary annexe of Small Heath School as the former Waverley is of the enlarged Oldknow. Garrison Lane houses the Educational Development Centre and a nursery school.

The Holy Family R.C. School, which began in Oldknow Road in 1904, has been rebuilt on Coventry Road. Holy Trinity R.C. School (not to be confused with the Anglican school in Trinity Terrace, closed postwar) uses Oakley Road School and new premises opposite, and St. Michael's R.C. School occupies Jenkins Street. The nearby institute is to be re-furbished as a multi-racial community centre. After the King Edward VI Schools' removal to Kings Heath in the mid-1950s, the Camp Hill buildings were used as annexes, became the Bordesley College of Education, and are now the Bordesley Centre for Teacher Education & Training of the Polytechnic. In September 1977 the Small Heath School and Community Centre was opened. This great complex on Muntz Street includes a comprehensive school, library, swimming pool, drama centre, crêche, community centre, sports hail, and facilities for several leisure and educational activities. It is headed by a joint management team. This is Birmingham's first and perhaps only such complex.

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