Liverpool Collegiate School

Liverpool Collegiate School was an all-boys grammar school, later a comprehensive school, in the Everton area of Liverpool. Foundations The Collegiate is a striking, Grade II listed building, with a facade of pink Woolton sandstone, designed in Tudor Gothic style by the architect of the city's St. George's Hall, Harvey Lonsdale Elmes. The foundation stone was laid in 1840 and the Liverpool Collegiate Institution was opened by William Gladstone on 6 January 1843, originally as a fee-paying school for boys of middle-class parents and administered as three distinct organisations under a single headmaster. The Upper School became Liverpool College and relocated to Lodge Lane in 1884, whilst the Middle and Lower (or Commercial) Schools occupied the original site and would combine to form the Liverpool Collegiate School in 1908. The Collegiate magazine, Esmeduna, which first appeared in 1896 and continued publication until 1978, was named after the ancient Liverpool manor mentioned in the Domesday Book, a name which had evolved into 'Smethesdune' by 1288 and survives to this day as Smithdown Road. Although aspects of Collegiate School life such as the annual Prize Giving, Founders Day Service, the school motto in Latin, and Esmeduna, along with the majestic Shaw Street building itself, stem from Victorian times, many enduring traditions originated after the Education Act 1902 gave new local education authorities powers to run secondary schools. The Collegiate was purchased by Liverpool Corporation in 1907 and was transformed into a single, integrated establishment entrusted to provide a high quality grammar school education. The Grammar School years The first headmaster of the new, LEA-controlled Liverpool Collegiate School was Samuel Edward Brown, appointed in 1908, a Cambridge graduate who set out to secure academic success at a time when the mark of a great school was the number of pupils winning university scholarships. The Collegiate also started to earn an enviable reputation within the city and beyond, and pupil numbers rose from around 400 in 1908 to over 1000 by the early 1920s.