Recent Years
In September 2005 it became a specialist school for Sport and the Performing Arts. The school has a strong musical tradition, with about a third of all pupils taking extra tuition in an instrument or voice. The Big Band and Senior Chamber Choir perform locally and the school organises a music tour bi-annually, geared mainly towards these two groups (though anyone is welcome). Recent tour locations include Budapest in Hungary during July 2006 and Liguria in Italy in July 2008. A former pupil, Frances Balmer, won the 2004 BBC Proms Young Composers' Competition.
The Knights Templar School received coverage in the national media in 2002 over the 'fixing' of 'A' level grades by examination boards. The school was the first in the country to appeal the grades awarded to its students in GCE 'Psychology'
In July 2007 the school's Art Department gained the Guinness World Record for Painting by Numbers.
As a specialist school in sport the Knights Templar School also has a million-pound sports centre with fitness suite and a floodlit all-weather sports pitch.
Guest speakers at the school in recent years have included politician Edwina Currie, film and television composers David Arnold and Debbie Wiseman, Cardinal Basil Hume, academic Professor Lord Soulsby, IVF pioneer Peter Brinsden, scientist Professor Sir John Polkinghorne, Professor Mick Aston from Time Team, former Cabinet Minister Lord MacGregor, actor and performer Gerald Charles Dickens, and two-times Olympic silver medallist Jonathan Glanfield. The Hoosiers performed an acoustic gig at the school in March 2011.
As of October 2012 there are 1332 pupils.
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Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour
high—I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning
home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“But—if you cannot give us ease—
Last of the race of them who grieve
Here leave us to die out with these
Last of the people who believe!
Silent, while years engrave the brow;
Silent—the best are silent now.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)