History
Few schools in Wales can boast a history as long as Vaynor & Penderyn. The school can record its history back to well over three centuries, with the first school on this site being a circulating school established in a farmhouse in 1740. There has been a school of one kind or another serving the community and offering opportunity of an education to one and all on this very site ever since.
The oldest building still in use dates from 1861. This works school was paid for by Rose Mary Crawshay, wife of the Cyfartha Ironmaster at a time when Merthyr Tydfil was arguably the Iron capital of the world. The school was extended in 1868 following the passing of the Parliamentary Bill known as the Forster Education Act.
This school continued to serve the community until it was further extended in 1932 when the Vaynor and Penderyn Grammar and Secondary School was established. The first Headmaster, Mr. Trevor Lovett, established a national reputation as an advocate of multilateral schools (a kind of precursor to comprehensive education) and was instrumental in placing this school at the forefront of educational innovation in the 1930s and 1940s. Innovations that as one might expect were a response to the unemployment and economic depression that South Wales experienced throughout the 1930s.
This school site has offered the opportunity of an education for one and all for more than 250 years. A record superseded in Wales probably only by the "public schools"
Read more about this topic: Vaynor And Penderyn High School
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“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
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