Queen Mary's High School, situated on Upper Forster Street, just outside Walsall town centre, is an all-female selective-education school and entry in Year 7 is by passing an entrance exam. It is twinned with Queen Mary's Grammar School, and like the Grammar School is part of the Queen Mary's Foundation.
The main body of the school is girls only, but the Sixth Form is open to applicants of both sexes and is conditional on a minimum grade achievement at GCSE (no fewer than 5 GCSEs above 'B' Grade, including the subjects you wish to take). This policy is similar to that of Queen Mary's Grammar School.
The school recently gained an outstanding level in the Ofsted report.
The school is a Language College and it is compulsory for girls to take one language to GCSE out of French, German, Spanish and Japanese; all girls are assigned to one language when they start year seven, their first language is either French, German or Spanish, or Japanese.In year 8 they are given an additional language - either French, Spanish, German or Japanese.They also visit the place where the language is spoken. The school year beginning in 2009 saw a change in rules for compulsory languages. In past years, it had been a requirement to take both languages for GCSE, but a second language is now optional. The school has recently been awarded Mathematics and Computing College status as well.
Average class sizes in lower school are about 24 girls.
The school is divided into houses named after famous 19th-century female authors - Austen (after Jane Austen), Bronte (after Charlotte Brontë), Eliot (after George Eliot)and Shelley (after Mary Shelley)
After 11 years of being headteacher at the school, Mrs Diana Woods retired at the end of the 2008/09 term, to go and pursue her travels in China, where her husband was working. She was replaced by the deputy headteacher at Wolverhampton Girls School, Mrs Alison Bruton, who is also a Physics teacher and enrichment programme(year 7)to some of the students.
QMHS also has an Old Girl's Club which was formed to promote and maintain contact between former pupils and with the school. It has a membership of over 300 with an active committee who endeavor to support and be involved with the interests of the school whilst maintaining contact with its members through an Annual Reunion Luncheon, annual newsletter and social events. The club is anxious to not to lose touch with those girls who are about to embark upon a new life away from what will hopefully have been an enriching and fulfilling career at the school.
Famous quotes containing the words high school, queen, mary, high and/or school:
“The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall.... The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn’t do if your life depended on it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
““The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then queen died of grief” is a plot.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“A fallen tree does not rise again.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 2412, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)
“It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent “celibacy,” by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity “backward.””
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“One non-revolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of permanent revolution.”
—Graffiti, School of Oriental Languages, London (1968)