Wallingford School

Infobox UK school
name = Wallingford School


size =
latitude = 51.60551
longitude = -1.12732
dms = dms
motto = "Sending every person into the world able and qualified to play their full part"
motto_pl =
established = 1659
approx =
closed =
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type =
religion =
president =
head_label = Headteacher
head = Mr Nigel Willis
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chair =
founder =
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specialist = Sports College
specialist_pl =
street = St George's Road
city = Wallingford
county = Oxfordshire
country = England
postcode = OX10 8HH
LEA = Oxfordshire
ofsted = 123261
staff =
enrollment = 1084
gender = Coeducational
lower_age = 11
upper_age = 18
houses =
colours =
publication =
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website = http://www.wallingford.oxon.sch.uk/
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Wallingford School is a secondary school located in the town of Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England. It was founded by Walter Bigg in 1659 in association with the Worshipful Company of Merchant Taylors.

About

The school's objective is to "send every young person into the world able and qualified to play their full part" in it. This message is broadcast a lot around the school along with pictures of everyday activities around the school. These are in most, if not all the buildings around the school.

Headteacher

Mr Nigel Willis is current headteacher of the school. He joined in early 2005 succeeding the current head, who was temporarily Mr Doug Brown, however it was previously Mr Jerry Owens. According to the BBC league tables, the school has improved in the GCSE results since the all time low in 2005.

Buildings

There are a number of buildings and "blocks" that link up the school that are named after various famous people from Wallingford or past teachers at the school. The main blocks are:

* The Blackstone Building: with Geography, Art, The School Library and, more recently, the sixth form block.
* The Main Building: with Reception, English, The School Hall, the Canteen, The Old Gym, Design & Technology, ICT, and many admin rooms.
* The Kershaw Building: with Maths, Drama, Music and Modern Foreign Languages (MFL).
* The Science Block (formally named as the 'Doug Brown Building': with Science and Technicians Offices.
* The Castle Leisure Center (also known as 'The Castle'): for PE lessons and large assemblies.

In recent years, Wallingford School has put forward plans to purchase the Castle Leisure Center from the current owners, SOLL, so the school can use the centre full time and take over management of public sports events, however, the school never bought the school due to 'financial difficulties'.

The School Day

The school day from the academic year of 2007-2008 and earlier consisted of five hour long lessons on Mondays to Thursdays, finishing at 3.20pm and starting at 8.40am, while Fridays ended at 2.40pm.

However, starting from September 2008, the school will enforce it's new timetable systems which instead will feature six, not five, lessons per day, each 50 minutes each, not 60. The new system will also stay consistent from Monday through to Friday. This means that there will be a total of 30 lessons per week, and therefore the Week A and Week B rotating old system can be done away with. The new system, which was announced in Spring [2008] , was followed by a lot of criticism from many staff and students because of the idea that creative subjects, such as Art or Design Technology will suffer for less teaching time in the curriculum.

The new timetable, therefore, starts at 8.40am every weekday, and finishes at 3.15pm every afternoon.

chool Council

The school council is composed of 14 student representatives. There are 2 reps from every year group, one girl and one boy, all the way from year 7 to year 13. These reps have to give speeches and are voted in by their whole year group.

There are also year council meetings, made up of 6 to 8 representatives, each elected by their tutor group.

Offsite passes

If students live within walking distance to the school (ie. within Wallingford) they are legible to claim a lunch pass meaning they are allowed to go back home during lunch times.

Sixth Formers are allowed to go offsite at breaks, lunchtimes and free periods anyhow.

Prefects in Year 11 are allowed offsite, and during the academic year, certain trusted Year 11's are appointed to be allowed to go offsite by teachers.

Gifted and Talented

Gifted and Talented students are selected and take part in events and activities that are organized during the academic year. Two schemes from the 2007-2008 year included 'Nagty' and 'Shine'. Nagty was a newsletter for the gifted and talented students. Shine, which was implemented for GCSE students only, was a brand new scheme for gifted and talented students to improve upon 2 of their talented subjects which in the end would help increase the students overall GCSE grade.

Citizenship

Since 2006 the school has been running a citizenship class for year 9 students within Gifted and Talented. They spend one hour per week working on citizenship, for one year for half a GCSE. To help with their coursework, they have hosted citizenship ceremonies hosted and organised entirely by the citizenship group . They are the only school in the country to do this.

ixth Form

Wallingford School features two parts - the secondary school, and a sixth form collage which merge together to feature the same teachers, lesson structure, subjects, timetable, etc.

Sixth Form students study AS-Levels in Year 12 (age 16/17) and A-Levels in Year 13 (age 17/18). However starting in September 2008, there will be a small number of students in the sixth form in the so called "Pre A-Level" course that allows students who wanted to study A-Levels, but didn't get the grades at GCSE to do so, can spend a year studying five GSCE subjects to retake, and then continue with AS/A2 Levels at the sixth form.

Sixth form students are respected enough within the school community not to wear school uniform like the other years 7 - 11, and are also allowed to sign in and out of the school site at break and lunchtimes as they please.

External links

* [http://www.wallingford.oxon.sch.uk/ Wallingford School website]