Foundation and History
The school was originally founded in 1541 by mayor Thomas Chipsey, as the town's free boys grammar school. In 1557, the school moved to St. Gregory's church, which was adapted for its use. The School remained on this site until 1864, when it moved to the Corn Exchange in the Market Square. In 1870, additional premises were opened in Abington Square to educate a further 200 pupils. Due to its popularity, the school moved again in 1911, to new buildings constructed on the present site at Billing Road.
During this period the school was known as the Northampton Town and County Grammar School.
In 1992, the school became Grant Maintained, later becoming a Foundation school. Under the leadership of Sir Bruce Liddington, followed by Michael Griffiths, it prospered as a prominent and over-subscribed school. From 1994, the school's GCSE results improved year upon year, and it has since become the only school nationally to have achieved an 11-year period of continual improvement.
During the 1990s, the school allowed the admission of girls into the Sixth Form. Currently up to a quarter of the Sixth Form can be girls.
In the summer of 1999 the school completed a new complex, Cripps Hall, named in honour of Sir Humphrey Cripps, philanthropist and Cambridge-educated former pupil of the school. It includes a theatre used for school productions and concerts as well as public performances. The building is home to the School's Expressive Arts and Modern Foreign Languages departments, as well as the theatre, drama workshop and Lounge.
During 2004, Northampton switched back to the two-tier system, once again making Northampton School for Boys a secondary school - consequently, the school had to admit pupils from the age of eleven. To cope with the increased numbers, the school for two years occupied a second site ("Northampton School for Boys West") at the former Cliftonville Middle School - separated from the main site by St Andrew's Hospital - for the new year sevens and eights. With the completion of the RIBA award winning new building, all pupils are now located back on one site.
In 2010, Northampton School for Boys became an academy, the first to do so in the county. This meant that the school received more freedom in terms of curriculum and examinations.
Read more about this topic: Northampton School For Boys
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—William Blake (1757–1827)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)