ALL together now, it’s Three Cheers for Worcester’s Nunnery Wood High School, which has been named Top of the Swots, or more accurately the best secondary in Worcestershire, in the latest government league tables.

In fact it was known as Nunnery Wood Secondary School for many years, although it didn’t start out that way. When the idea for a new school on the south east side of Worcester was first mooted in the early 1950s the plan was to call it Nunnery Farm Secondary. Sitting among green fields and trees, the site in Spetchley Road actually had the old Nunnery Farm buildings right on its boundary.

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However, before it opened in 1954, the name adjustment had taken place and now, as the urban sprawl has closed in, it would seem an unlikely place for an agricultural holding. Although having said that, with today’s fondness for keeping in touch with our roots, Nunnery Farm School might be a popular choice.

Nunnery Wood’s current title dates back to 1983, when, following a restructuring of schools in Worcestershire, Nunnery Wood Secondary School was renamed Nunnery Wood High School. It is now officially listed as a co-educational school and a Science College, with about 1,350 students on roll aged from 11 to 16.

There has always been a touch if the countryside about Nunnery Wood and not just because of the name. The school campus is surrounded by 15 acres of gardens and playing fields it shares with the adjacent Sixth Form College, which was created out of the former Worcester Grammar School for Girls. The school benefits from refurbished or purpose built extensions, including facilities for science, English, music, art and design, languages and ICT.

Following the opening of the adjacent Nunnery Wood Sports Centre in 1985, used as a shared facility, the high school has an all weather outdoor pitch and athletics track and a sporting panorama that would only have been a pipe dream to PE teachers back in 1954. Needless to say, it produces some excellent sports performers.

So here are a few images to remind former students what they looked like in the past – and some of the characters who taught them – now they are possibly married with mortgages and children of their own.