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Our old school is undergoing
its biggest physical change since it opened on the site 74
years ago - the huge new
Sixth-Form building is nearing completion, and in September
it will house a limited intake of sixth-formers.
Along with some temporary buildings,
it will also provide decanting facilities for the main school
whilst it is refurbished. The plan is to re-open the main
school, and be at full sixth-form capacity at the start of
the new school year in 2011.
Although I've had a brief look
at the building from the outside, I'm hoping to get an inside
tour in the near future and will report back, including a
far better account of what has been happening, and is due
to be done.
I took this photo of the new building
back in February. Yes, that's the front of the main building
on the left - the grass has been tarred over, but the space
between the two buildings will eventually be landscaped.
And the picture below
is a better view of the building itself
Finally, you may or may not be
aware that Headteacher, Ken Gibson, is also working as interim
Executive Head of Jarrow School. It is a recognition of his
strengths at Harton that he was asked to get involved at Jarrow
following its Ofsted "notice to improve" last October.
Regular
visitors will notice that the past year has seen relatively
few site updates.
The main reason is that there are
far fewer contributions these days. They still do come in,
but most are name additions/corrections rather than new photos.
The second is lack of time. The
old story about being retired and wondering how there was
ever time to go to work is so true.
The third is that I've had some
(very minor) health problems that have slowed me down on the
computer.
There are a couple of photos still
to be processed and uploaded, which I hope to do in the next
few days, plus a pile of old Atoms and Westovian school magazines
still to be processed. I've been trying to write software
to streamline the processing of these, and I'd also like to
make them available as text-based documents using optical-character-recognition
software (at which point I'll introduce a site search facility).
In addition, the site itself is
getting a little long in the tooth. I'd like to make some
changes in due course, including uploading some higher-resolution
school photos. Initially, with home computer displays being
rather limited, I tended to limit photos to 700 pixels wide.
I started to increase this to 800 pixels, but now I'd like
to provide access to much higher resolutions (which is one
reason I've always tried to insist on very high-resolution
scans from photos).
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Whether you, or perhaps other members of your family, went to the South
Shields High School for Boys, the Westoe Secondary School or Westoe
Higher Grade School, South Shields Grammar-Technical School for Boys, Harton School,
or Harton Technology College (or you're a student or member of staff
there today), this site is for you. The present-day school at Harton started
life as the South Shields Boys' High School in Mowbray Road (founded in
1885) and the Westoe Secondary School (founded in 1890 as Westoe Higher
Grade School, itself founded in the Ocean Road Schools Arts and Science
section in 1887) - they both combined in 1936 to form the South Shields High
School for Boys in a custom-built building in Harton. In 1953 the name
changed to the South Shields Grammar-Technical School for Boys, and then
in 1974 it became Harton Comprehensive. By the end of the 70s it had become
co-educational and became Harton School. It is now called Harton
Technology College
effectively a co-ed comprehensive with Technology College status. This site
is for anyone who went to or taught at any of these schools, but I also hope that
it will prove useful for those researching their family history (as several genealogists
have already discovered). I was at the school (South Shields Grammar-Technical
School for Boys, hence the dominance of that name on the site) from September
1962 to July 1969, and have very fond memories of my time there (although there
are a few things I'd rather forget). So I decided to put together this site about
the school, from its founding to the present day. It was launched in December
2001, and re-launched with a new design in December 2002 - by June 2003 it had
attracted almost 3 million hits! Almost everything you see has either been
sent to me by Old Boys from the school, or has been taken from the school's archives.
If you have anything at all to offer, whether it's just to
correct or add a name or two to the photos, or if you have old photos that aren't
on the site, old ATOMs, Speech Day programmes or anything else of interest (or
you just want to let me know what you think of the site), please email
me (but please contact me first before sending any material, as you
may be about to send something I already have waiting in the wings). Oh
... and you may recognise the colour scheme for the site as being the school colours
- dark blue, light blue and gold.
Mike Todd
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