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Kesteven and Sleaford High School (KSHS) is a grammar school for girls aged between 11 and 18, located on Jermyn Street in the small market town of Sleaford in Lincolnshire, close to Sleaford train station.
History
KSHS was founded in 1902 as the then independent Sleaford and Kesteven High School Ltd.
Awards
KSHS is a specialist Arts College in the visual arts, awarded in 2003. KSHS has also been awarded several quality marks in recent years: Career Mark (2006), Charter Mark (2002), Artsmark Gold (2002), and Investors in People status (2004, and 2006). KSHS was also the first school in Lincolnshire to be awarded the ICT mark (2006), and has also received a Dfes Achievement Award. The school is a member of Sleaford Education and Business Partnership.
Campus
KSHS occupies a fairly congested but attractive site between Sleaford's high street (known as Southgate) to the west and the site of the long-demolished twelfth-century Sleaford Castle to the east. The school is housed in a number of buildings, some old and some relatively modern. One of the old buildings is no. 62 Southgate, built about 1850 in the Jacobean style by a local architect called Charles Kirk who was responsible for a number of Sleaford's most prominent nineteenth-century buildings. New buildings for the twenty-first century include a technology block, sports hall and drama studio. The school has its own playing fields on-site.
Students
Highly popular, and with demand for places outstripping supply, the school has pupils drawn from a large area of south Lincolnshire and as far as Newark in Nottinghamshire. KSHS offers an extremely supportive environment, with special provision for the talented and gifted as well as those with special needs, and as a result unauthorised absences are extremely low (0.1%). A number of the pupils and staff have connectins to the Royal Air Force since the school lies only a few miles from the RAF college at Cranwell.
The annual intake to Year 7 for Key Stage 3 is around 120 though in 2006 the number rose as a one-off to 150. In 2006-7 there were 844 girls on the roll.
The sixth form is joint, shared with Sleaford's other schools: Carre's Grammar School, and St George's College of Technology, a mixed non-selective school.
A number of the pupils are members of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY), and represent the highest school membership for Lincolnshire.
Fieldwork and other activities
KSHS offers foreign trips for pupils studying Geography, History and Art. History pupils in Year 11 have the opportunity to study the Third Reich and the Cold War on the annual journey to Berlin, and can also take part in the joint Geography and History trip to Paris and Normandy. Geograpohy pupils participate in field trips within the UK as well. Art students are offered a visit to New York. Those studying languages can take part in foreign exchange visits. The school supports pupils participating in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme.
Performance
The exam results are very similar to the all boys' grammar school located in Sleaford, Carre's Grammar School. In excess of 97% of the KSHS pupils gain five or more GCSEs at A*-C. The average UCAS point score (2006) at A level is 343 with the average point score per examination entry being 79.3. More than 90% of the AS/A2 level students go on to higher education.
The Ofsted report for 2007 declared that KSHS 'is an oustanding school which has made many improvements since the last inspection when it was judged to be good. The headteacher and her senior leadership team have developed exemplary systems to monitor the work of the school ... Parents are overwhelmingly positive ... Achievement is oustanding ... There is an outstanding curriculum ... The school provides an excellent level of care and guidance which results in outstanding personal development ... The school is exceptionally well led by the headteacher and her senior team.'
The headteacher is Mrs Alison Ross (appointed 1996), leading a staff of approximately 45 teachers of whom around three-quarters are female.
References
- 2007 Ofsted report
- Sleaford local history site
- Schoolnet site (requires registration to access school details and reviews)