History
The school was founded in 1706 as the first charity school in Nottingham. Under the guidance of the then rector of St. Peter's church, Timothy Fenton. Classes being taught in the porch of St. Mary's Church in the Lace Market area of Nottingham. On the 1 May 1707, the school moved to St. Mary's Gate.
In 1723, land that was given by William Thorpe on High Pavement in Weekday Cross was used and the school migrated there, remaining for over a century.
Between 1853, the school moved to a purpose-built building on Mansfield Road in Nottingham. The building is now the International Community Centre. A statue of a child in a latter-day Bluecoat uniform remains on the outside of the building. A road behind this site of the school is called Bluecoat Close.
In the period between the two World Wars, the school became a Grammar School. During the 1960s fund-raising was undertaken to acquire new property and to construct a purpose-built new school to allow for expansion including on-site sports fields. In 1967, the school relocated to the current premises on Aspley Lane in Aspley, two miles to the east of Nottingham. This allowed the school to increase the intake from one class to two classes (from 30 students to 60) resulting in the number of the pupils increasing to around 350 over a period of about five years. At the same time, the school assumed voluntary aided school status.
By 1978 the number of students had grown to 900 with the new status as a comprehensive school catering for eleven- to eighteen-year-olds. Two decades later, a further status change took place with the school being awarded Technology College status by the Department for Education and Skills enabling the school to receive additional funding for development Science, Mathematics and Information Technology education.
In 2003 Bluecoat was "twinned" with, and then later took over the site of Margaret Glen-Bott School in the nearby Wollaton area. The site was renamed as The Nottingham Bluecoat School and Technology College: Wollaton Park Campus with the main Bluecoat site becoming the Aspley Lane Campus. The two sites began to operate as a single school and share some administration resources including a single headteacher/principal for the two sites.
Read more about this topic: The Nottingham Bluecoat Academy
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