Higham Lane School

Higham Lane School

Motto	Helping Learners Succeed
Established	1939
Type	Academy
Headmaster	Phil Kelly
Location	Shanklin Drive Nuneaton Warwickshire CV10 0BJ England
Local authority	Warwickshire
DfE URN	125741 Tables
Ofsted	Reports
Students	1,230
Gender	Co-educational
Ages	11–16
Colours	mainly red, black and white
Website	www.highamlane.warwickshire.sch.uk

Higham Lane School is a secondary school in Weddington, Nuneaton, England. The current headteacher is Mr Phil Kelly who became headmaster in January 2006, replacing Dr R. Tetlow. The school teaches pupils aged eleven to sixteen (Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4) in preparation for their GCSEs. The original school building dates back to 1939 but, with the inclusion of new laboratories, a sports hall and new Business & Enterprise Centre, has been extensively extended and modernised since. In 2003, after a successful bid, the school was granted Business and Enterprise College status under the specialist schools programme. On 1 January 2012 the school officially gained Academy status.

School farm

In the 1970s, and 1980s, the school became well known for the smallholding established by teacher John Terry, which he wrote about in several books. When Queen Elizabeth II visited Nuneaton for the first time in December 1994, she visited the school to present a calf to the school farm and to open the school's new science block. The school farm continued to operate successfully until Terry's retirement in 1998 when it fell into a state of disrepair due to lack of funding.

The area where the school farm was located became a school garden that included two ponds and an aviary of budgies. Teacher Mr Faulds ran the garden with the help of a small group of enthusiastic pupils led by Mark Leaney. The garden won the secondary school category for Nuneaton's Britain in Bloom five years running but closed at the end of the school year in 2008. The aviary has now been converted into a workshop where Construction courses are delivered to Higham Lane School pupils by a lecturer from North Warwickshire and Hinckley College.

The building

The school building is composed of many parts, but the two main sections of the building – Coombe to the east and Chine to the west (both of which take their names from types of geographical feature found on the Isle of Wight, continuing a theme found in the street names in the vicinity of the school) – were originally three different schools, with no physical link between Coombe and Chine. Chine initially housed Higham Lane Infant School (whose assembly hall is now the library) and Higham Lane Junior School (whose assembly hall is now Chine Hall), while Coombe housed a secondary modern school (Higham Lane High School). These three schools closed and were combined to form a comprehensive school following a major reorganisation of schools in Warwickshire in the early 1970s.

Additions to these two core buildings include dedicated classrooms for subjects requiring special equipment, such as design and technology (in particular resistant materials, graphic design and food technology, all on the north side of Coombe), science (situated to the north-east of Coombe) and physical education (to the north-east and south-east of Coombe). Other subjects (mathematics, geography, history, art, music, English, modern foreign languages, business, religious education, etc.) are taught in classrooms in the main body of Coombe and Chine.

The school also offers a prayer room that is open all day.

Notable Alumni

• Gareth Edwards (director) - Director of Godzilla (2014 film) and Monsters (2010 film)

• Jon Holmes - Bafta award winning comedian, writer and presenter Xfm, The Now Show BBC Radio 4, writer of TV's Horrible Histories, BBC Radio 2, BBC 6Music

External links

• Frog @ Higham Lane School
• Higham Lane School website
• Higham Lane School OFSTED reports