| Education
From at latest the 14th century a school had been in use beside
Yardley Church. The building so fortunately preserved is of 15th
century half-timber framing and 18th century brick. Legacies to
the Yardley Great Trust for poor relief and education had made
it wealthy enough to permit the opening of a second school, known
as the Hall Green Charity School, on the Stratford Road/School
Road corner. It lasted from 1721 until 1899. Boys only were educated
there, largely by members of the long-lived Swinburne family.
A girls' school nearby in 1835 did not long survive.
For nearly thirty years Horsfall's little school educated children
of wire-workers at Hay Mill. In 1874 St. Mary's Church School
opened in Fox Green Lane. For twenty-six years from 1858 the Rushall
Lane chapel was in use as a Nonconformist school. Yardley School
was set up following the 1870 Act, but it did no more for the
first twenty years of its existence than help to support existing
sectarian schools, despite the huge increase in child population
for which those could not provide places. Then the old Stockfield
Road chapel, and rooms in Bard Street Sparkhill were in use as
Board Schools until Greet and Redhill Board Schools were ready
to admit the hundreds of illiterate children of Greet and Hay
Mills (1892). The Board met thenceforward in a building on Warwick
Road, now the caretaker's house, next to Greet School, which had
been built on the site of Greet Farm.
In 1902 Worcestershire Education Committee succeeded the Yardley
Board. It opened a temporary school in an iron building near Broadyates
House in 1906, and closed it two years later when Church Road
Schools were completed. Formans Road School opened in 1907, and
the Acocks Green Schools two years later. Holy Souls R.C. School
had by then been open for two years. St. Mary's School in Broad
Road, condemned in 1906, was saved by renovations during the next
few years: it finally closed in 1974.
In 1904 the County had established Yardley Secondary School
in Sparkhill Institute, vacated by the Rural District Council
on completion of the new Council House. Six years later the school
moved to the recently vacated site on Warwick Road, overlooking
the new engine sheds and sidings. Youthful detractors called it
'Tyseley Tech'. However, it was centrally placed to provide secondary
education for boys and girls from all over Yardley, though some
had a four-mile journey on foot or bicycle to reach it. Golden
Hillock Schools opened in the same year, 1910. The English Martyrs
School Sparkhill, of the following year, was the last to be built
pre-World War One hereabout. Birmingham Education Committee, which
took over in 1912, needed to build no new schools until the late
1920s, when the new municipal estates were producing large numbers
of children. For them were provided Yarnfield (1928), Hartfield
Crescent and Oaklands, Dolphin Lane (1929), Severne and Pitmaston
(1931), Cottesbrook, Yardley Road (1933) and Lakey Lane (1935)
and Yorkmead, York Road (1937).
English Martyrs School was destroyed by bombing in 1940 and
its replacement was begun ten years later. A demolished wing of
Yardley Secondary School was replaced in 1953 by one of three
storeys whose windowless front wall carries a large carving of
the school badge: the pears of Worcester are prominent thereon.
Gilbertstone School opened in 1950 and Archbishop Ilsley R.C.
Secondary seven years later on an enclosed site between Victoria
and Shirley Roads. Cottesbrook and Holy Souls have moved to new
premises, St. Christopher's R.C. School opened in the 1960s off
Shirley Road and is now called St. Ambrose Barlow, the Harrison
Barrow/Hartfield Crescent schools combined as a comprehensive
in the 1970s.
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