Our church school

How it began

On 15 January 1834 our Rector and three other members of our church bought a plot of ground abutting Hadley Common, with a cottage standing on it, for two hundred pounds. They were the Reverend John Richard Thackeray, Rector of Hadley, Alexander Dury, Andrew Hopegood, and James Quilter. The deed was enrolled in the Court of Chancery that March, and a plan drawn in its margin marks three buildings fronting the Common: the Boys' School, the Girls' School, and the cottage where the Mistress lived.

The deed calls them the National Schools of Hadley. National Schools belonged to the society founded in 1811 to educate the poor in the principles of the Established Church, so from the first day this was a church school, and a school for children who would otherwise have gone without. The Rector was one of the four original trustees, and the Rector sits on the governing body still.

Whom it was given for

The deed says plainly what the ground and the buildings are held for. The trustees are to permit and suffer them to be

used or occupied for the purposes of the said National Schools for the education therein of Boys and Girls of the Parish of Hadley aforesaid and, unless objected to by the Trustees or Trustee for the time being, of the adjoining Parishes or immediate Neighbourhood, as the Committee for the time being of the said Schools shall think proper.

It names no other child. It sets no distance, no radius and no catchment. And it provides that if the schools were ever broken up, what they were worth should pass to National Schools nearby, so that the children of this parish might still be taught.

Nearly two centuries on, that is still the trust the school is held upon. The Charity Commission Scheme of 31 March 1885, made on the application of Frederick Charles Cass, then Rector and the continuing trustee, remains the school's governing document, and it names the deed of 1834 as the foundation.

Before 1834

Schooling in Hadley is older still. The 1834 deed looks back to the will of Andrew Hopegood, made on 4 November 1742, under which the inhabitants of Hadley clothed and educated twelve girls of the parish. That school was known as the Hadley School of Industry. The Hopegood name appears again among the four trustees who bought the ground in 1834.