The Marlborough School (not to be confused with Marlborough College, the Wiltshire fee-paying school) is a co-educational Church of England comprehensive school serving the historic Oxfordshire market town of Woodstock and its surrounding villages. The school takes its name from the Duke of Marlborough whose ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, also the birthplace of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, is in Woodstock. The school currently enrolls over a thousand pupils and its head teacher is Mrs. Julie Fenn. The school is approximately six miles from the City of Oxford. The school is known for its innovation and was ranked in 2006 by The Times as both one of the top 500 state secondary schools and one of the top state schools for A level success.
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History
Although Geoffrey Chaucer once taught at a school in Woodstock, The Marlborough School was inaugurated in 1939 by the Lord Bishop of Dorchester, suffragan bishop of the Anglican diocese of Oxford. It was preceded by the 16th century Woodstock free grammar school. Reorganized as a community comprehensive in the educational reforms of the 1970s, the school suffered particularly badly from the underfunding of English state education in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the lessons were then taught in temporary classrooms. In the last decade, new language, mathematics and sixth form blocks have been built to complement the existing brick modern-style science, music, library/cafeteria buildings and sports hall. The school has extensive sports fields. From the 1970s through to the 1990s, the school had a reputation as a socialist's "comprehensive comprehensive", with a focus on teaching "how to learn" and "how to socialise" (which it did with varying degrees of success) rather than training pupils simply to sit exams. Former headmaster, Mr. Jerry O'Hagan, could have been said to have been ahead of his time when he favoured CSEs over GCE 'O' level exams as he preferred to emphasise cumulative and cooperative learning for pupils over competition; the two examinations have since been combined to form the modern GCSE. On the other hand, many educationalists dispute the "competitive" nature of O-levels per se: the two exams were very much a two tier system, however, with 'O' levels being the more academic exam (remember a Grade 1 CSE could be counted as a Grade C GCE). In recent years The Marlborough School has pretty much thrown off that progressive reputation, possibly because such an attitude would be less popular with the increasingly middle class local population. Nonetheless, since 1976, the school has had a strong sixth form programme whose pupils have attended some of the country's top universities. Exam results are now excellent, particularly by the standards of local education authority controlled schools. In 2005 and 2006, the school made The Times Parent Power Top State Schools list. In 2006, plans were unveiled for a new £1m multi-purpose school building with a theatre, cinema and conference venue proposed as future uses. This building, the Marlborough Enterprise Centre, opened in early 2007 and saw a student-led production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in July of the same year.
Elective System
The Marlborough School features an "elective" afternoon every Wednesday for all its pupils. This scheme was launched in the mid 1980's and is still in effect and very popular to this day with students. Students can choose, on a termly basis, which out of around 30 activities they wish to partake in, these very from 5-a-side football to cookery, the Schools In Action project and coursework assistance for those Key Stage 4 pupils who require it.
Ormerod Department
A particular feature of the school is an embedded unit from the Ormerod school which allows children in Oxfordshire with disabilities to be educated in a mainstream secondary school. From 1st September 2007 the two schools will migrate into one, rather than the Ormerod School being situated at Marlborough.
External links
- School Web site
- The Marlborough School
- Performance Centre gets Electrovoice
- Marlborough School receives Fair Trade award
- Pupils help draw up new centre designs
- The Oxford Trust
- Marlborough School students tend war graves
- Animation Station project
- Students British Board of Film Certification
- English Schools Football Association
- Girl's car speed protest pays off
- Marlborough School wins major prize
- Oxford Girls Choir
- Ormerod Sports
- Times UK Top Schools
- Bank of England/Times Interest Rate Challenge 2004, runner up
- Rugby: Telegraph Emerging Schools
- West Oxfordshire School Sports Partnership
- Oxfordshire Lawn Tennis Association
- Boon or Bust for Teen Tycoon
- School takes broader view
