Oasis Academy Wintringham


Oasis Academy Wintringham is a secondary school on Weelsby Avenue in Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire, England. It is just off the A16 Peaks Parkway just south-west of the A46 crossroads next to the Lisle Marsden CE Primary School in Wellow and on the Grimsby-Cleethorpes boundary. The school is of a religious foundation, and lies in the ecclesiastical parish of St Augustine of Hippo.

History

The school began in 1933 as Wintringham Secondary School on Eleanor Street.

Grammar school

The current school buildings in Weelsby Avenue, Grimsby, were opened in 1953 as Wintringham Grammar School to replace the former school on Eleanor Street, Grimsby. The school was first divided into a boys' and girls' grammar school on a combined site, with around 750 boys and a similar number of girls. The boys' school was only the Weelsby Avenue side of the site, and the girls' school was on the west side of the site, accessed via Park Avenue next to the tennis courts. The Highfields School was next door, to the north, which is now the Lisle Marsden CE primary school. The school was administered by the County Borough of Grimsby Education Committee, which had its offices on Eleanor Street. The headmaster of the boys' school in the 1950s was Ronald Gill. The headmistress of the girls' school until the late 1970s was Dorothy Dean. The schools were separate up to 1969 when a mixed 6th form was the start of a gradual merger. It shared the playing field, as were out-of-school activities. From September 1969 a sixth form block was built between the two sites, which was then co-educational with a size of 200. From the late 1960s until 1974 it was administered as the single-entity Grimsby Wintringham Grammar School for ages 11 to 18. The old Boys’ School became the Upper School, and the old Girls’ School became the Lower School. Music lessons were held in Highfield House, an old Victorian detached house on the school property.

Comprehensive

It became the comprehensive Wintringham School in September 1974. The school name comes from the Wintringham family, specifically John Wintringham. Also in 1974 administration was transferred over the Humber to Beverley, and Humberside County Council, in the Grimsby Division. The school became a comprehensive year by year, with the first all-ability year composed of ten forms. It also became an upper school with ages 12–18, as Grimsby became part of the three tier system. There was still streaming in the school, with two main streams: the ‘X’ stream and the ‘Y’ stream. The X forms took mainly GCE examinations and the Y forms took the CSE examinations, and/or fewer GCEs.
In the late 1980s, headmaster Keith Bardgett switched the school from streaming to mixed-ability classes, the change starting with the new intake of pupils in September 1988. A restricted form of streaming remained, limited to specific subjects, notably Mathematics and foreign languages. From September 1990 the naming convention for classes switched to the modern nomenclature still in use today. At the same time, a re-organisation of local education saw Wintringham give up its 6th Form and take in new pupils a year earlier than was previously the case. This meant that the 2nd - 6th forms were replaced with Years 7 - 11.
In 1996 administration passed back to Grimsby under North East Lincolnshire]. Streaming similar to that of its grammar school days was re-introduced.

Oasis Academy Wintringham

Since September 2007, the school has been transformed into an Academy run by the Oasis Trust, and the new state-of-the-art buildings has replaced the current ones with a cost of £25 million. Construction started on 30 August 2007, being undertaken by Clugston Construction of Scunthorpe who finished in January 2009. The start of construction work was marked by a groundbreaking ceremony on 30 August 2007, where Steve Chalke and pupils from the new Academy drove the first spades into the ground where the Academy and community facilities would be built.
The old school closed in August 2007 and opened as Oasis Academy Wintringham in the existing buildings in September 2007.
The Academy transferred across to the brand new buildings during the academic year 2008-09 in February 2009. The sports hall is sponsored by Stagecoach. The Dean Suite is named after Dorothy Dean, the headteacher of the school from 1953–75, who died on 23 October 2011 aged 96.

Alumni

Wintringham School