Education
- see List of schools in Kent
The town of Maidstone has fifteen secondary schools, twenty-three primary schools, and two special schools. Three of the secondary schools, Maplesden Noakes, Invicta Grammar School and the St Augustine Academy (formerly Astor of Hever School) have been awarded Business and Enterprise College status.
Alumni at the town's oldest school, Maidstone Grammar School (founded 1549), include James Burke, television presenter, and Lord Beeching, notorious for the British railway route cuts of the 1960s. William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies was once a teacher at the school.
Oakwood Park to the west of the town is host to a regional campus of the University for the Creative Arts (formerly Kent Institute of Art & Design) at which Turner Prize nominated artist Tracey Emin, fashion designer Karen Millen and television personality and artist Tony Hart once studied. Several secondary schools are also located there; Oakwood Park Grammar School, the local Catholic secondary School, St. Simon Stock School and the aforementioned St Augustine Academy.
Maidstone has two other independently/non-government funded academy schools: Cornwallis Academy (formerly The Cornwallis School) and the New Line Learning Academy (a combination of former schools Oldborough Manor School and Senacre Technology College), all of which were formerly state schools. The Senacre School site closed and was turned over to housing development with all school activities moved to the former Oldborough site, which is to be rebuilt. Cornwallis Academy has been recently rebuilt, at an estimated cost of over £62m.
Maidstone Grammar School for Girls is also situated in the town.
As of the 2001 census, 15.7% of the town's residents aged 16–74 had a higher education qualification or equivalent, below the national average of 19.9%. 27.5% had no academic qualifications, compared to the national figure of 28.9%.
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Famous quotes containing the word education:
“The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.”
—Jean Piaget (1896–1980)
“... the physical and domestic education of daughters should occupy the principal attention of mothers, in childhood: and the stimulation of the intellect should be very much reduced.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“I am not describing a distant utopia, but the kind of education which must be the great urgent work of our time. By the end of this decade, unless the work is well along, our opportunity will have slipped by.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)