Dame Alice Owen's School


Dame Alice Owen's School is an 11–18 mixed, partially selective secondary school and sixth form with academy status in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, England. It is part of the Dame Alice Owen's Foundation; its trustees are the Worshipful Company of Brewers.
It was founded in Islington as a boys' school for 30 students in 1613, which makes it one of the oldest schools in the United Kingdom, and is named after its founder, the 17th-century philanthropist Alice Owen. Over time, the boys' school expanded. A girls' school was built in 1886, and the two schools were merged in 1973; the mixed school moved to its current location at Dugdale Hill Lane in Potters Bar in stages between 1973 and 1976.
The school is one of the highest performing state schools in England and Wales in terms of the General Certificate of Secondary Education and GCE Advanced Level results, and is widely considered one of the best schools in the UK. In 2016, it was named the State Secondary School of the Year by The Sunday Times in the newspaper's rankings for the 2016–17 school year, and Tatler and The Daily Telegraph have also strongly praised it.

History

Foundation: pre–1613

Dame Alice Owen's School was founded in 1613 by the English philanthropist Alice Owen. Owen decided to found a school to thank God for saving her when she was a child after she narrowly avoided being struck by an arrow, which passed through her hat, in the fields in Islington; the exact nature of this event is disputed.
The death of her third husband in 1598 caused Alice Owen to be free to carry out her plans. On 6 June 1608, she acquired a licence to purchase of ground in Islington and Clerkenwell, on which to build a hospital for 10 poor widows, and to confer power over that land to the Worshipful Company of Brewers. The site had been called the "Hermitage" field. In 1609, Owen officially gave authority over the charity she had founded to the Brewers' Company; by indentures dated in that year, she had given the company an annual payment of £25 to support her almshouses.
After founding the almshouses in 1608 on the site, which was on the east side of St John Street, in 1610 Owen obtained the right to build a school and chapel in the same location. It was built between 1610 and 1612 and probably opened in 1613. Three iron arrows were fixed into a gable in the building, to commemorate the time when she was almost hit by an arrow; Owen also erected a free chapel there. On 20 September 1613, she made rules for her school ; notably, the school was to take thirty boys – twenty-four from Islington and six from Clerkenwell – and be inspected by the Brewers' Company once a year.
The rules also stated that the school's headmaster was to be paid five pounds every three months and be given a house to live in for free; he was to teach writing, mathematics and bookkeeping. Her will, directed the yearly purchase of land worth £20 in order to pay the headmaster's salary. The first man to hold the position was William Leske, who held the position until 1614 before resigning. Samuel Lewis Jnr writes that according to John Stow's Survey of London, building the school and almshouses, as well as purchasing the land, cost £1776. To provide her charity with an income, the executor of Owen's will, Sir Thomas Rich, bought a farm in Orsett in Essex for £22.

Traditions

The school has maintained many traditions from the time of its founding, such as the giving of a small amount of "beer money" to every pupil. This is a reminder of the school's long-standing close association with the brewing industry and the Worshipful Company of Brewers; pupils in Year Seven receive a special five-pound coin in a ceremony at Brewers' Hall in London, while the older years are given money at school by the Master of the Worshipful Company of Brewers on the last day of the academic year. Arrows feature prominently on the school's crest, which is in itself largely identical to the crest of the Worshipful Company of Brewers; other motifs on the school's logo include barrels and hops.

Early years and expansion: 1613–1886

William Smith, who held the position of headmaster between 1666 and 1678, was dismissed because of alleged involvement in the Popish Plot. In 1731, Thomas Dennett, who had been the headmaster since 1717, ran away.
In 1818, the Charity Commission found that there were 55 boys at the school – the 30 specified by Owen, and 25 private pupils. Only the private pupils learned French and Latin. At the time, the headmaster earned £30 a year. The value of the trust estates in Islington and Clerkenwell had grown to £900 a year by 1830. The school was rebuilt and a new almshouse was built in 1840 or 1841 on a new site in Owen Street, Islington, at a cost of about £6,000, because the old buildings had fallen into disrepair; the original buildings were demolished. The school was expanded when new classrooms were built in 1846 and 1860. In 1842, there were 85 boys attending the school – one-fifth of them were from Clerkenwell while four-fifths were from Islington – though the new school was intended to be for 120 boys. That number of pupils had been reached by 1865, when there were 100 boys from Islington and 20 from Clerkenwell at the school.
A new project received royal assent on 14 August 1878; this scheme enabled the school to expand into two schools – one for 300 boys, and the other for that many girls. The almshouse was demolished so that a playground could be built. The front of the boys' school was rebuilt on a larger scale at this time. The girls' school was opened in Owen's Row in 1886; its first headmistress was Emily Armstrong.

Boys' and girls' schools in Islington: 1886–1976

The boys' school was expanded further in 1895–96 so that 420 boys could go there; a new wing was built, which included a library and science laboratories. In 1897, a memorial to Alice Owen was commissioned; this statue is still located in the modern school. A building used for lunch as well as art and woodwork was built in 1904. During Robert Chomeley's time as headmaster, the boys' school obtained playing fields in Oakleigh Park and he built several huts there, which were used for lessons. An assembly hall was added to the boys' school during his tenure; it was built in 1927.
The schools were evacuated to Bedford during the Second World War, in which the schools' buildings were badly damaged. The girls' school was mostly destroyed by bombing in 1940 and had to be rebuilt; on 15 October 1940, 143 people were sheltering in the basement when a parachute mine hit the building, causing a pipe to flood the basement and killing 109 of the occupants.. Temporary huts were initially used when the students returned in 1945; a new five-storey girls' school building was built between 1960 and 1963.
Dame Alice Owen's School achieved voluntary aided status in 1951. There were over 600 boys at the boys' school in 1963, of whom more than 100 were students in the school's sixth form. That year, the boys' and girls' schools celebrated the 350th anniversary of the school; this involved various celebrations, including sporting events and concerts. The first official history of the school, by Reg Dare, was also published that year; there was also a Thanksgiving Service at St Paul's Cathedral on 30 April. A new building, part of the girls' school, was opened in October. Funds were raised to purchase a residential centre for both of the schools to use. Pupils stayed there for periods of several days and learned there; the centre, which was located outside London, was called Harrock House. It opened in May 1965, and closed in 1985 due to the cost of maintaining it.
The boys' school was located in Goswell Road. The girls' schools was also located there and faced the boys' school across the boys' playground.
The two schools merged in 1973 and were run as a mixed school while pupils were transferred in stages to the school's current location in Potters Bar in Hertfordshire between 1973 and July 1976. Reasons for the move included the restrictions of the site in Islington and a decline in the number of pupils in the area. The school was opened on 8 June 1976 by Princess Anne.
The former boys' school building has now been demolished; the girls' school building is now part of City and Islington College.

Mixed school in Potters Bar: 1976–present

On 2 November 1990, the Duke of Edinburgh visited the school and opened a new building for physics and information technology that also houses a library, called the Edinburgh Centre. On 25 November 1997, the Princess Anne opened a building for the sixth form and modern languages called the Bertrand Ryan Centre. Five other buildings have been added to the site since 1976.
In 2011, the school became an academy; it had previously been a voluntary-aided school. In June 2018, construction started on a new teaching block to replace the old one, which Hannah Nemko, the headteacher, described as "no longer truly fit for purpose"; the building was to cost approximately £5 million, with the funding coming from the UK government and the Brewers' Company. In January 2019, the school received a grant of £50 000 from Hertsmere Borough Council to refurbish an astroturf sports pitch.

400th anniversary (2013)

To commemorate the school's quatercentenary in 2013, the school established a 400th Anniversary Committee chaired by the musician Gary Kemp, which organised several events. Kemp is an Old Owenian who met some of the future members of his band Spandau Ballet at the school. Construction was set to start in February 2013. By November 2013, more than £840 000 had been raised. In 2014, Lord Winston unveiled the new block. Staff and volunteers made a cake at the school, large enough for all the staff, students and parents to share; this marked the beginning of the celebrations. The film director and producer Sir Alan Parker directed a Celebration Concert at the Royal Albert Hall in April 2013, featuring performances by various groups of students, as well as members of Spandau Ballet. A Thanksgiving Service was held at St Paul's Cathedral on 30 April 2013; it was meant to be held a week after the concert. In November, the train company First Capital Connect named one of its trains "Dame Alice Owens 400 years of learning" to honour the occasion.
The programme of various sporting occasions, a drama production and a ball at the school ended with a carol service at St Albans Cathedral on 16 December 2013. Old Owenians could keep in touch with what was happening by joining the school's 400th anniversary email list, to which over 3 300 alumni signed up.
In conjunction with the celebrations, a 400th Anniversary Appeal was set up to raise £1 million towards a new science building for the school. It was launched in February 2011 by Lord Robert Winston. Kemp was the chairman of the appeal; he said that the school needs assistance "to support... the scientists of tomorrow". The total cost of the building was predicted to be £6 million. The new block was unveiled by Lord Winston in 2014.

Governance

The Dame Alice Owen's Foundation supports the school, and its trustees are the Worshipful Company of Brewers. The school's governing body consists of thirteen Foundation Governors, two elected teacher-governors, the headteacher and three elected parent-governors. The Governing Body meets once in every school term, and will hold additional meetings if necessary., the Chair of Governors is Peter Martin.

Admissions

The school is partially selective by means of an entrance examination; roughly a third of pupils are selected based on academic ability, while others are chosen because of musical skills, having a sibling at the school or living in the school's catchment area. 200 pupils are admitted to Year 7 annually; this is the school's published admission number. Sixty-five children enter through the entrance examinations each year and 10 through a musical aptitude test. There are 22 places available for children who live close to the school; this criterion was introduced in 2008 to give priority to those who live locally. There were 38 applications under this criterion in 2018. Tatler have described the admissions procedure as "mind-boggling". The school also allows external applications to its sixth form.
Students are drawn from a wide area, and the school is heavily oversubscribed. In 2013, it received 665 more applications than there were places., fewer than a quarter of applications succeed; ten people apply for every place offered to external candidates to the sixth form. In 2018, the school received 819 applications, of which 359 had the school as their first preference.
In 2006, Alan Davison, the school's headteacher at that time, strongly opposed a plan by the Department for Education and Skills to ban partially selective schools from prioritising applications from the siblings of students attending the school, saying that the proposal threatened the school's "family-friendly atmosphere", and also stated that potentially affected schools were obtaining legal advice.
The school has reported that many families buy or rent houses near the school that they only live in for a short time in order to obtain a place at the school for their children, then move back to their original homes soon after. The school believed that this practice disadvantages families that have lived in the area for a long time. According to the school, half of the pupils who had received places due to proximity to the school in 2008 had moved back to previous homes which were further from the school by 2010. The school introduced several rules to combat this problem; one requirement is that families who retain a previous home within of the school must live in the new home for 36 months before applying to the school, else the new address will only be treated as a temporary address. This was increased from 24 months for the 2018 and 2019 admissions. In 2018, a parent objected to this change on the grounds that it disadvantaged families who did not want to sell their former homes, arguing that the concerns about families moving away from the area after obtaining a place were not applicable to him and that school made the change without thinking of people in his situation. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator, which works with the Department for Education, did not uphold the objection; it ruled that the arrangements did not affect a particular racial or social group and that they were fair. In 2013, Davison criticised Hertfordshire County Council and the British government for their alleged lack of response to fraudulent applications for the places at the school available based on residence. He said "eople will do anything to ".

Academic performance

In terms of exam results, the school is one of the highest-ranked state schools in the country, with over 95% of students receiving 10 A*–C grades in their GCSE exams. The school has appeared in the 2014 Tatler State Schools Guide, where it was highly praised and described as a "golden ticket for Islington parents". In 2016, it was named the State Secondary School of the Year by The Sunday Times in the newspaper's rankings for the 2016–17 school year; it was the first school that was not a grammar school to win the award. That year, it was also described as one of the ten best comprehensive schools in the UK by The Daily Telegraph. In 2018, The Sunday Times named the school its Regional State Secondary School of the Year 2019 for the Southeast. In 2009, the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills rated it outstanding.
Around 90 per cent of students enter higher education, with many going to some of the best British universities: in 2016, 14 successfully applied to the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge. the school's record number of successful applications to these institutions in a single year is 30, which was achieved in 2013; two-thirds of students go on to Russell Group universities. In a 2016 study, Sol Gamsu, a PhD student at King's College London, found that Dame Alice Owen's School acts as a "de facto feeder school" for Oxbridge. According to a briefing paper about higher education published in 2019 by the House of Commons Library, 10.5 per cent of the school's pupils who go on to university go to Oxbridge; by this measure, it is the best performing state comprehensive school in the UK.
The school had its first two students attain places on the prestigious Prime Minister's Global Fellowship programme in 2009.
Dame Alice Owen's School has been a Science Specialist School since 2007 and 43 per cent of students go on to study science at world-class universities. The school holds regular lectures, organised by its science society, for students; worked with Cancer Research last year on a skin cancer project and is building relationships with Imperial College London. The school aimed to attract additional government funding, with over £250 000 already raised as of 2011, to support the construction of a new science block, which finished in 2014.

Exam results

2018

In 2018, 49.9% of General Certificate of Secondary Education entries were graded 8–9 and 69.4% were graded 7–9 ; five students received only top grades. At GCE Advanced Level, 29% of entries were graded A*, 84.8% were A*–B and 95.1% were A*–C. 28 students went on to study at Oxford or Cambridge University.

2016

In 2016, 94% of all Year 11 students secured 5 A*–C grades including English and Maths in their GCSE exams, which was significantly higher than the average for the school's local education authority and the average for England ; 68.6% of entries were given grades of A* or A. The school's A-Level results were described by the school's headteacher, Hannah Nemko as "fantastic"; 94.1% of grades were A*–C, with 82.1% being A*–B and 55% being A*–A.

2015

At A-Level, 55.5% of grades were A*–A, 80.7% were A*–B and 93.8% were A*–C in 2015. 22.9% of grades were A*'s, and 16 pupils secured university places at Oxbridge.

2012

At GCSE, 94.2% of pupils achieved 5 A*–C grades including English and maths and 96.1% of pupils received 5 A*–C grades without English and maths. 64.5% of entries were graded A*–A, and many pupils only received A* grades. A Level results for that year were also record-breaking.

2011

In 2011, 93% of all Year 11 students secured 5 A*–C grades including English and Maths. 96% of all Year 11 students secured 5 A*–C grades without English and Maths. 68.1% of all entries were graded A or A* and 32% were graded A*. 82.1% of all grades awarded were A*–B. There was an upward trend with the new A* grade, with 21.3% of all entries being awarded an A*, 32% were awarded an A, making the A* and A total 52.3%. 64 of all students secured straight A*s and As. 99.4% of all entries secured a pass grade. 20 students with offers confirmed their Oxbridge places and the majority of students secured places at their first choice of university. AS results showed a new school record with 54.1% being graded A and 78% being graded A or B.

Extracurricular activities

Dame Alice Owen's School offers a wide range of extracurricular activities for the pupils that attend it. Many pupils take part in the Duke of Edinburgh Award, including around 30 annually who do the Gold Award, the highest level. and school trips, for example to the Galapagos Islands, Costa Rica or CERN. There are also opportunities for students to visit the school's partner school in Tanzania.
The school offers a wide range of sports for students, including football, gymnastics, rugby and athletics; some pupils represent the school at the national level. Music is also important; the school has numerous bands, orchestras and choirs, and hundreds of pupils learn to play musical instruments at school. Drama and art are also a feature of the learning experience; there is more than one drama production each year. Clubs and societies include chess and debating. The school also has a student-produced magazine, called The Arrow, which was first published in 1899 and is now published once a year.

Location and school grounds

Dame Alice Owen's School is situated in the south of Potters Bar, just north of the M25 motorway and near South Mimms services. Its grounds have an area of and include a lake and large playing fields. In 2014, Alice Rose, writing for Tatler magazine, praised its "excellent facilities" and "smart campus"; in 2016, the journalist Sue Leonard, writing in The Times, said that the school "offers...facilities many other secondary schools can only envy", and described its sports grounds as "enormous".
Students at the school come from a wide area, and the school is served by six bus routes. Four of these are London bus routes contracted by Transport for London : the 313, 626, 692 and 699. Two other bus routes, namely the 242, which is operated by Metroline, and the 610 also stop at the school. More than 200 students also travel to school by train daily via Potters Bar railway station.

Notable alumni

The school has had many notable former pupils, who are referred to as Old Owenians. Those for careers in the entertainment industry include Fiona Wade, an actress in the soap opera Emmerdale; Dame Beryl Grey, a ballerina; Jessica Tandy, an Academy Award-winning actress; Gary Kemp, the lead guitarist and songwriter for the band Spandau Ballet, and Sir Alan Parker, a film director.
Sportsperson alumni include the gymnast Gabrielle Jupp; Jodie Williams, a sprinter; Paul Robinson, a professional footballer, and Dame Mary Glen-Haig, a gold-medal-winning fencer at the Commonwealth Games. Old Owenians notable for their achievements in science are Frederick Gugenheim Gregory, a botanist who won the Royal Medal; Leslie Reginald Cox, a palaeontologist, and the chemist Leslie Orgel, who is known for inventing Orgel's rules. The Marxist journalist and historian Andrew Rothstein also went to the school.
Two former Labour MPs have attended the school: Ronald Chamberlain, MP for Norwood, and Millie Miller, leader of Camden Council and MP for Ilford North. The politician Alan Amos, who was the Conservative MP for Hexham, taught at the school between 1976 and 1984.

List of headteachers

The modern and former boys' and girls' schools have had many headteachers:

Mixed school in Potters Bar

Works cited