Woodhouse Grove School

Kingswood School, near Bath, in the West Country, served as the sole Methodist school from 1748, but was inconvenient for northern residents. The topic was raised at Conference in 1781 and John Wesley replied, "Probably we may (provide such a school). Let our brethren think of a place and a master and send me word".[4] Adam Clarke returned to the subject at the 1806 conference, in his first year as conference president.[5]

With the purchase at Woodhouse Grove in Apperley, near Bradford, the decision to found the school was made by ballot at the Wesleyan Conference of 1811, still under Clarke.[6] It initially provided an education for the sons of the itinerant ministers in service of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the north of England. The original name, The Wesleyan Academy, as evidenced by a commemorative wall plaque at the school, did not catch on.

Few alterations were needed to convert the house for use as a school, but the barn was cleaned up as a schoolroom and the stables converted as a chapel. The drawing room became a lecture and study room and thirty wooden cribs (or cots) were provided for the boys to sleep on. The school opened on 8 January 1812 under the headship of John Fennell as first master and with an initial roll of twenty seven pupils.[7]

For much of the 19th century, between 1812 and 1875, Woodhouse Grove and Kingswood operated as separate schools for children aged between eight and fifteen years old, with both schools under direct control of conference. The school also had a local management committee and there were frequent conflicts with conference over duplicated but differing decisions relating to teacher selection, staff salaries and building expansion needs. Between 1875 and 1883, the two schools were combined as a single school, despite the problems caused by being two hundred miles apart. The Grove served as a preparatory school with pupils then relocating at the age of thirteen to the upper school at Kingswood.[8]

The school was refounded on 21 September 1883, the "New Foundation Day", to admit boys from a wider spectrum of backgrounds. The Grove received its first pupils as a Methodist middle class boarding and day school under a new policy laid down by the Wesleyan Conference.[9][10] The sermon on the New Foundation Day was given by the Reverend Robert Newton Young, himself a former pupil of the school between 1837 and 1843, and the sermon was based around the text “Bone et Fidelis” or “Good and Faithful” which was to become the new school motto to the present day.[11]

By the summer term of 1884, the school roll had expanded to 155 pupils. During the Second World War, and under direct grant funding after the 1944 Education Act, the school expanded, with boarding pupils placed and paid for by London County Council and the East Riding of Yorkshire authority.[12]

Traditionally a school for boys only, the school first admitted girls to the sixth form in 1979 and has been fully co-educational since 1985.

For several years, HM Inspector of Schools had recommended that Woodhouse Grove make better provision for younger pupils. Under the guidance of the Secretary of the Methodist Education Committee, Rev. H. B. Workman, the preparatory school at Brontë House was founded in 1934 as a junior preparatory school for five- to eleven-year-old boys. The school became a coeducational establishment in 1985.[13]

The school stands in the grounds of a former private residence called Ashdown House and was originally known as 'Woodhouse Grove Preparatory School'. Ashdown House stood in the grounds of an older mansion known as Upperwood House where Charlotte Brontë was once governess to the White family's two children. The first master of the new school was Dr F.C. Pritchard, MA, who later wrote the 1978 history of the school and its development.[13]

Initially, Brontë House had no kitchen facility of its own and the children were escorted back and forth in all weathers to the Grove for their lunches and dinner. Later, a small car was bought by the school to ferry prepared meals from the main school kitchen to Brontë House,[14] until a proper kitchen was built several years later. A boarding facility is provided for pupils.