Smestow School

Smestow School, also known as simply Smestow (pronounced "smest-oh") is a co-educational state school located in the City of Wolverhampton, England.

Smestow School
Address
Windmill Crescent

Wolverhampton
,
West Midlands
,
WV3 8HU

England
Information
TypeAcademy
Established1964
Department for Education URN140586 Tables
Head teacherMr David Smith
GenderCo-educational
Age11 to 18
Enrolment974
Websitehttp://smestow.org/

History

The school was founded in 1964 under the authority of Staffordshire County Council. Originally it was known as Tettenhall Number 2 with the number 1 school becoming Regis (now The Kings School). It is named after the River Smestow, to which it is very close, although the school grounds are actually bordered by the Finchfield Brook and the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal. It was incorporated within Wolverhampton by the boundary changes accompanying local government reform in 1974, which brought Tettenhall as a whole into Wolverhampton.

School Badge

The school badge has its origins in the Tettenhall coat of arms.[1] The three roundels in the arms are of a special type, with a distinctive wavy pattern, known in Heraldry as fountains. They were considered to represent the Severn/Trent watershed and the tributary rivers which originate in the area, which include the River Smestow. The original Tettenhall arms had three trees, representing the three great forests of southern Staffordshire which met at Tettenhall: the forests of Kinver, Brewood and Cannock. The school badge adapted this into a tree composed of four circles, representing the four houses of the school, which were named after the new Universities of Lancaster, Sussex, Warwick and York, founded around the same time as the school. The badge also contains allusions to other features of the Tettenhall arms: the Windmill and the Battleaxes, reminders of the Battle of Tettenhall which took place on 5 August 910.

Specialist school and academy status

The school is a specialist sports college, and was presented with ARTSMARK (alongside the previously awarded SPORTSMARK) in 2004 for outstanding success in Drama & the Arts. Smestow has a wide variety of sporting facilities including a gymnasium, swimming pool, PE hall, four separate changing rooms, a fitness suite/gym, a small dance/aerobics area (also used for drama room) a set of tennis courts and two large playing fields as well as the new sports hall.

On 1 February 2014 the school converted to academy status.

Future plans

In January 2015 a new Sixth Form Study Centre and library opened to promote and support students studying at Smestow. The school is benefiting from Building Schools for the Future funding and plan to build a sports hall within the next 3–4 years.

Notable former pupils
gollark: I mean, any recent Intel/AMD CPU and tons of ARM SoCs have hardware video encoding.
gollark: You'd really think they'd hardware-accelerate that.
gollark: I think my school just assumes everyone will have laptops or something.
gollark: Except that the fan seems to be a bit broken because it's somewhat loud under load, really should fix that somehow.
gollark: I got a used business laptop for £140 and added £30 worth of extra storage and RAM and it's much better than an equivalently priced Chromebook.

References
  1. Reproduced at the Civic Heraldry of England website.

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