Kepier School

Kepier School
Motto Believe in You
Established 1574 (1574)
Type Academy
Principal Nicola Cooper
Founder Bernard Gilpin
Location Dairy Lane
Houghton-le-Spring
Tyne and Wear
DH4 5BH
England
54°50′25″N 1°28′26″W / 54.84015°N 1.47395°W / 54.84015; -1.47395Coordinates: 54°50′25″N 1°28′26″W / 54.84015°N 1.47395°W / 54.84015; -1.47395
Local authority Sunderland City Council
DfE URN 137262 Tables
Ofsted Reports
Gender Coeducational
Ages 11–16
Website www.kepier.com

Kepier School is a coeducational secondary school located in Houghton-le-Spring in the City of Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England.[1]

Kepier School offers GCSEs, BTECs and OCR Nationals as programmes of study for pupils. The school also operates a five-year football academy programme for gifted young players.[2]

History

The school was built and endowed in 1574 by Bernard Gilpin, an influential clergyman who became known as the 'Apostle of the North' and was associated with Houghton-le-Spring.

The school has resided since 1990 in its current building, which was formerly the Sancroft School. It was built in 1974 though has had major renovations since it became Houghton Kepier School. The change of building was decided when Houghton-le-Spring Grammar, Shiney Row Comprehensive, Sancroft Comprehensive and Bernard Gilpin Comprehensive began a merger over the latter years of the 1980s.

On the merger, the schools were known as Houghton Kepier School, a name that lasted until 2007 when the school gained specialist Sports College status and was renamed Houghton Kepier Sports College. It became a foundation school in 2006 and converted to academy status in 2011.[3] It wasn't until the incumbent headmistress Nicola Cooper joined the school in 2011 that further changes to the historic logo and name were made and introduced for the autumn term in 2012.

The original Royal Kepier Grammar School still stands off Church Street, though the building used until 1990 is now demolished. In 2015, the school announced it was to demolish its current building and build a state-of-the-art three-storey academy on a disused sports field.

Ofsted

The school has been inspected by the Ofsted four times since 2012.[4] In 2012, the inspectors deemed it 'Satisfactory".[5] Both inspections in 2013 saw the school judged as "Requires Improvement", with the inspectors commenting that leaders and managers do not always focus their actions where they are most needed and do not check the impact on students’ achievement.[6] In 2016, the school had improved sufficiently to be rated as "Good", because of "... vastly raised teachers’ expectations of how quickly pupils can make progress in all of the subjects they study."[7]

Controversy

In early September 2017 it was reported that students were forced to line up in the rain while the principal compared the students' trousers with a swatch of fabric supplied by Total Sport, to ensure the grey trousers were from this supplier. These cost £15.99, while similar products were available for £7.00 elsewhere. Students not wearing the "required" trousers were sent home.[8] The school website, on its "Learner's Uniform" page, does not mention a specific supplier and describes the uniform not as grey, but as "black tailored school trousers".[9]

Notable former pupils

Notable former staff

References

  1. ↑ "Home". kepier.com.
  2. ↑ "Football Academy". kepier.com.
  3. ↑ "Welcome to Kepier". kepier.com. Archived from the original on 2015-05-12.
  4. ↑ "Ofsted Kepier". Ofsted.
  5. ↑ "Houghton Kepier Sports College: An Academy Inspection report" (PDF). Ofsted.
  6. ↑ "School report Kepier" (PDF). Ofsted. Retrieved 7 September 2017.
  7. ↑ "School report Kepier" (PDF). Ofsted. Retrieved 7 September 2017.
  8. ↑ "Sounds like life in North Korea' - what you said about the 'wrong trousers' row at Kepier School". Sunderland Echo.
  9. ↑ Kepier School website
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