Page 10 - Natioinal School

Redditch Heritage The National School

St. Stephen’s School

Memories of St. Stephen’s

The enlarged National School eventually became St. Stephen's First School. St Stephens was
enlarged in 1870 and again in 1893.

By the time Vic Bott attended the school in 1905. education was free:

"Everyone in the locality went there, whether rich or poor, so the poor children sat with the
middle class children in their expensive clothes. Several children from that school who came
from extremely poor families have done very well."

Philip Coventry went to St Stephen's in the 1950s:

“I can remember my first day at school, I must have been about five. There were no play-
groups or nurseries, no gentle introduction. You went from being at home all day to being at
school all day. I was terrified. Mothers brought the kids down and dumped them at the gate
and left them to it. (There were only mums at the school gates, never any dads.) As well as
being a general shock it was a cultural shock. Some kids ran away. An alleyway went from
the school to the headmaster's house and they would run down there. They were dragged
back screaming by their mothers and whacked round the head. I didn't run away because I
was too timid and frightened.

'We had outside loos and a tarmaced playground. After you had been in the infants for two
years you went to the big boy's school across the road in Peakman Street. You stayed there
for another four years until you were eleven, then you went to Lodge Farm. When I started at
the big boys' school it was just boys. After twelve months it went co-educational. That was a
disaster. I had a peaceful quiet life until then. All these big rough girls came. They were much
worse than the boys."

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