When the new co-educational King Edward VII School started in September 1969 the school was based on two sites, a mile and half apart. One building was on Darwin Lane at Crosspool that had briefly been Crosspool Secondary Modern School (1965-69), while the other one was the imposing classical building on Glossop Road, built between 1837-40, that had once been Wesley College and all the city knew as King Ted’s.

At Darwin Lane (later called Lower School) KES looked like a co-educational school. Half the pupils were girls and many of the teachers were women. Three of the four Year Groups  were former secondary modern pupils, but the first year students (10 forms) were an unselected comprehensive intake mainly from the surrounding suburbs and were rather middle class. The Headmaster, Russell Sharrock, believed 40 % would have passed their 11+ exam if it was still being held and most would be capable of taking “O” Level in a few years time.

The Headmaster’s wife (Mary Sharrock, a JP and University Lecturer) designed a new uniform for girls at the school. In winter girls would wear a dark blue skirt and a pink and white gingham blouse, changing in summer to wearing a pink and white striped dress. (One girl said it made them look like humbugs). The colours were not chosen at random but were the colours of the Alexandra rose, named after the wife of Edward VII.

If you looked a little deeper you would find that almost all the Head of Department posts and the Year Tutor posts had gone to former KES teachers, who were all men. The exceptions being the Head of Girls PE, Eileen Langsley, Head of Domestic Science, Jennifer Gelder, Head of Remedial Education, Amy Perry, and Margaret Ward the First Form Girls’ Year Tutor.

It was not until 1973 that a female Assistant Headteacher was appointed when Winifred Kinnear, a former headmistress at a Glossop girls’ secondary modern school was selected, after her own school had been amalgamated with a grammar school to form a new comprehensive school.

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Meanwhile at Glossop Road very little seemed to have changed. There were now 13 girls in the Sixth Form but very few other girls graced the grand Palladian building in those early years. One reason given was that there were no separate changing and toilet facilities for girls (the 13 sixth formers used a former staff toilet) and the situation did not change until an ugly breeze-block addition to the rear of the building was completed in 1972. (The boys still used the ancient open-air toilets adjoining the rear perimeter wall and they felt discriminated against after 1972). However, the new Sixth Form girls did embrace one KES tradition and several of them went to university, with two going to Oxbridge, (the first was Margaret Young who went to St Hilda’s at Oxford to read Economics).

The boys in the Sixth Form were universally delighted that there were now girls at the school. Some observed that not only did the arrival of girls have a civilising effect on Sixth Form boys but there was also a softening of their teachers’ strict disciplinary system that had previously often mobilised the use of aggressive sarcasm and the deployment of the cane. Some of the girls who had come from girls’ only schools also enjoyed the attention they received, but were uneasy to be called by their first names while their male classmates were called by their surnames.

There were also six girls’ prefects now and one was the Girls’ Head Prefect (Margaret Hodge was the first in 1970), but at first the Girls’ Head Prefect was not allowed to sit on the platform at Prize Distribution Night.

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Gradually women teachers were appointed to teach at Upper School. One of the most respected was Dorothy Hall who came in 1971 to teach History but who became Head of Sixth Form in 1981 for over a decade. The Sixth Form had always been the crowning glory at KES with its numerous Oxbridge successes and under Dorothy Hall it became the largest Sixth Form in the city. This was continued by two other Heads of Sixth Form, Sheila Basford (1993 -2000) and then Dr. Rebecca Carpenter (2000-2016), until it numbered 600 students with very many coming from other schools across the city and joining KES’s own pupils who had been in the school since Y7.

By the early Nineties all three Deputy Headteachers were women. Two of them, Kay Madden (1981-2005) and Kath Auton (1988-2006) had long and significant careers at KES where they played a major role in the continuing transition and success of the school. There have been three female Chairs of Governors since 1986, Shelagh Marston, Carolyn Leary and Barbara Walsh and finally, in 2008, Beverly Jackson was appointed as the first woman Headteacher of KES and was succeeded by Linda Gooden in 2016. Currently there are more women teachers on the staff than men and girls outperform boys at the school at almost every level.

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From the earliest years as a co-educational school girls began to make their mark on the school. The Seventies were a golden age for sport at KES and girls’ sport made an equal contribution to the rising standards. In that first decade there were 28 girls’ teams representing the school at a wide variety of sports, with the opportunity to partake in 14 different games or activities, including gymnastics, horse riding and ice skating. One girl, Yvonne Hanson-Nortey, won the shot putt at the English Schools Championship and later represented Great Britain at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, winning a Bronze Medal at the Commonwealth Games at Auckland in 1990. Another girl, Joanna Sime, was a top gymnast, who, while still at school, represented Great Britain in senior international competitions against countries from behind the Iron Curtain.

Similarly girls played an increasingly influential part in KES’s extra-curricular activities, so that today they form a large majority of the school choirs and also of the school dramatic productions. So much so that one forgets that before 1969 all the cast of the school plays, as well as members of the orchestra and choir, were boys. When the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award was introduced to the school in 1975 the first two winners of the Gold Award were two girls, Linda Edwards and Sarah Houghton, and they received their award certificates at Buckingham Palace from the Duke himself in 1977.

If the new comprehensive school made a slow start towards gender equality it has made great strides since and many female students have passed through the school and gone on to live positive lives and have important careers in Britain and abroad. Arguably the most famous Old Edwardian of the present day is Emily Maitlis, who left KES in 1989 to read English at Cambridge and has had a stellar career with the BBC, currently serving as the senior presenter on the BBC 2 Newsnight programme.

J.C.Cornwell

October 2019