Trinity Academy, Edinburgh

The school was designed in 1891 by George Craig, a Leith architect for Leith school Board.[2]

On 4 September 1893, Craighall Road School was opened with Thomas Trotter, formerly of North Fort Street, as rector. With a frontage deemed ‘of a superior kind to most other schools’ it had cost £18,850 and five shillings, (excluding the purchase of the land from the Laird of Bonnington, James Clerk-Rattray) and had electric bells and voice tubes connecting the Rector's room to the classes and gas lamps throughout.

The formal opening was carried out by Flora Stevenson on 1 February 1894. The board intended making all the elementary departments fee-paying, waiving fees only for the secondary, but a dissenting member wanted free education and complained to the Scottish Office. He pointed to friction at Leith Academy, with those paying fees looking down on those who did not. The majority prevailed and fees were paid at Trinity until the comprehensive schooling debate, three-quarters of a century later.

In 1895 the first 127 pupils were presented for Leaving Certificates in Mathematics, Arithmetic, English, French – 81 successfully. In 1901 the school became Trinity Academy under the new Rector, Thomas Duncan. The Great War claimed seventy-one former pupils and two teachers out of some three hundred who served.

The school operates a house system and the three houses are Arran, Skye and Orkney.

Plans for a new block were again on the drawing board when the Second World War broke out. Many pupils were evacuated to Macduff on the Moray Firth until normal classes resumed in 1941. The following year Dr Albert Weir became rector. In this war Trinity lost sixty-two former pupils.

Post-war landmarks during the rectorship of Alexander Neill between 1953 and 1969 were the completion of the new secondary block in March 1962 and the removal of the primary school from the huts at Bangholm to the new school on Newhaven Road in January 1968.

Trinity’s sixth rector, William Brodie, arrived in 1969 at a time when educational tides were turning, fees were being phased out, and the days of selective schooling in the public sector were numbered.

In September 1974, Trinity Academy merged with David Kilpatrick’s to become a fully comprehensive secondary serving North and West Leith, Newhaven and Trinity. There was a split site, first with the David Kilpatrick building and then, after 1981, with the Holy Cross annexes. Declining school rolls across the city led to the possibility of closure of the school or of merger with Leith Academy.