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1878: Sherwood Board School
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Compulsory education was provided for the young children of Sherwood when the stone building on Haydn Road known as Sherwood Board School opened in August 1878. (The date of 1877 on the school refers to the start of building, not the completion). At that time it was more or less surrounded by fields and the only buildings near by were Pennhome Almshouses, Burton’s lace factory and a few houses on Burton Street. Later a dairy was built next to the school and opposite was a market gardener. Haydn Road was then very quiet in spite of its name - Occupation Lane. (A few years later the stretch beyond Hucknall Road was called Waterworks Lane because of the adjacent Bagthorpe Waterworks which supplied Nottingham with its first pure water supply from circa 1880).
Alderman Gripper, Chairman of the Nottingham School Board, said the credit for the erection of the school belonged to the late lamented Basford School Board which had bequeathed it to Nottingham when Basford became part of the Borough of Nottingham in 1877. On August 12th 1878 the school opened for the first time to admit girls and infants but not boys, who had to wait a few years. In fants paid 2d and the girls either 3d or 4d per week., Although the Board paid for a very few poor children. There were Government exams at the end of the first full year and 78.8% passed in reading, 61.5% in both writing and arithmetic.
The first Headmistress was Miss Redgate who was paid £80 per annum and was assisted by Miss Annie Hutchinson who recived £50 per annum (She was replaced after a year by Miss E. J. Fernie). With the help of one monitor the staff of two coped with a school which had the capacity for 150 children. By 1892 there were two assistant teachers and two pupil teachers, one of whom, Miss Fair, stayed at the school for 39 years.
Discipline was strict and illness rife: the school was closed frequently because of epidemics which also affected teachers. However, it was not an epidemic on January 28th 1903 which caused Miss Gray to keep fainting and Miss Cross to go into violent hysterics - perhaps their stays were too tight: The school closed for a week in 1897 to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and also for a day in 1898 when Barnum and Bailey's show came to town. On the field opposite the school marquees were erected for Temperance groups and circuses - infact a dancing bear came round the streets of Sherwood in circa 1910.
The problem of overcrowding in Sherwood School grew much worse in the first decade of the 20th century, when most of the houses on streets off haydn Road were built. A temporary school was opened in 1909 in the Methodist Chapel on Osborne Street but like many temporary measures it lasted a long time, until 1925 in fact.
History of Sherwood: A Nottingham Suburb
Terry Fry, 1989, Page 40
1878: Sherwood Board School