The Bemrose School


The Bemrose School is a foundation trust all-through school situated on Uttoxeter New Road, Derby, England, with an age range of pupils from 3 – 19. Opened as a boys' grammar school in 1930, it became a co-educational comprehensive school in 1975. It then became an all-through school with the addition of a primary phase in 2014.

History

A new school called the Derby Municipal Secondary School for Boys was founded in Abbey Street, Derby, and opened on 12 September 1902. In December 1923, a new site for the school was acquired in Uttoxeter Road, Derby, and for some years was used for games. New school buildings designed by the architect Alexander Macpherson were built on the new site in 1928–1930 at a cost of £71,746, and when the school moved into them in 1930 it was renamed Bemrose School, in honour of the services to education of the Bemrose family of Derby, and in particular of Dr Henry Howe Bemrose. The new school was officially opened on 11 July 1930 by Sir Charles Trevelyan, President of the Board of Education.
A memorial to the sixty-eight old boys of the former Derby Municipal Secondary School who died in the First World War was moved to the new school's main corridor where it remains to this day.
The school was originally divided into seven houses, each with its own colour and motto: Burke, Drake, Gainsborough, Nelson, Newton, Sidney, and Wellington. By 1973 these seven houses had been reduced to four: Burke, Newton, Sidney and Wellington. In present times, the houses remain but they are now named after stately homes in Derbyshire – Chatsworth, Hardwick, Haddon, Kedleston.
The school became a grammar school, until in 1975 it was merged with Rykneld Boys' Secondary Modern School to make a new comprehensive school, when girls were first admitted, named Bemrose Community School. When Bemrose became a Foundation Trust school, its name was changed to The Bemrose School.
In 2015, a new building was built and a Primary Phase was opened, making Bemrose an all-through school for ages 3–19. Work began in 2017 on a £14 million three-year refurbishment and expansion programme that will create places for an additional 700 pupils at the school.

Headteachers

Boys' grammar school

In 2010 The Bemrose School opened Elmtree, a specialist autism unit, it is a separate unit to ERF opened some years ago.