The Skegness Grammar School located within a 15 minute walk of the Skegness beach and 10 minutes from the Skegness railway station was founded in 1483 by the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, William Waynflete.

Skegness Grammar School originally called Magdalen College School was created to act as a feeder school for Magdalen College at Oxford University. The original Magdalen College School (located in Wainfleet a few miles from Skegness) moved to it’s current location in 1933 and was renamed the Skegness Grammar School, locally known as TSGS by pupils and parents.

The grammar school specialises in Sport, Science, Maths and Computing and was the first British secondary school to be awarded Grant Maintained status by the Conservative government in 1988.

Map of Skegness Grammar School

The Skegness Grammar School Review

That’s the obligatory history of Skegness Grammar School out of the way, now for our recent personal experiences.

Our youngest son Caleb (Caleb’s Website) will be 15 years old in September 2011 (currently Year 9) and has been home educated since birth (never attended school). Most reading this review will be unaware of home education, educating a child to year 10 (14-15 years of age, pre-GCSE) isn’t particularly difficult, but continuing beyond year 10 (the GCSE years) is challenging and can be expensive: not easy to arrange GCSEs outside the school system. We also found with our eldest son who never went to school (didn’t sit GCSEs) and is almost 20 years old and currently studying Computer Science at University, the higher educational ‘establishment’ does not take home education seriously: he had to work twice as hard to be accepted at University despite being gifted educationally (he’s set to get a 1st class honors degree).

Caleb plans to study a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University and the chances of this occurring if he remained home educated is unrealistic. Therefore we decided to home educate Caleb until he reached the end of year 9 and find a good school for him to study GCSEs and A-Levels. Hence applying to Skegness Grammar School: the best school in our area.

The Skegness Grammar School Application Process

We sent in the mid year application forms to Lincolnshire Local Education Authority (standard form available online) and within a week or so had a phone call from the Skegness Grammar School to arrange the selection tests. As a selective grammar school TSGS only admits the top 25% of children who sit the 11+ tests. Being 14 1/2 Caleb sat age appropriate tests in Maths and English at the grammar school and a week later was offered a year 9 placement at the school (was a straight forward process).

The Skegness Grammar School starts their GCSE courses early (end of May during year 9), so he’ll be studying GCSEs within weeks. Very impressed with the speed getting our son into the school, he sat the Maths and English selection tests on the 27th April (two days before the Royal Wedding : long bank holiday weekend), we received a letter dated May 4th (Wednesday) from the headmaster that he could start school on May 9th (the following Monday). The application process couldn’t have been much faster.

The grammar school has a new headmaster (as of Easter 2011), Mr David Ward who played international rugby which sounds like a good match for a school with a sports specialism. Caleb has recently started playing rugby with the local Skegness Rugby Club and hopes to play rugby at the grammar school as well, will be interesting to see if the new headmaster is hands on with sport at the school :-)

We met the new headmaster on his second day at the school and had an interesting chat about his future plans for the Skegness Grammar School and it’s relationship with the Skegness community and local business. He wants to open the school further to the local community, there are already links with TSGS and Skegness, they have an extensive program of extra curricula activities, for example Caleb’s been participating in fencing classes since 2010 (only 50p a lesson).

Caleb starts The Skegness Grammar School for the first time after the weekend, when he’s settled in I’ll add more information to the review. Have a feeling we’ll not be seeing him much over the next few weeks as he tries many of the extra curricula activities.

David Law