A BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN PARK SCHOOL UNTIL 1980

For many years the City of Leicester enjoyed the enviable reputation of being in the forefront of providing Special Education.

In Germany, around the 30’s, a movement grew up whose principle was that fresh air, rest and good food was the panacea for a lot of ills.  At that time there was extreme poverty (unimaginable today), malnutrition and serious illnesses such as tuberculosis, diphtheria and respiratory infections.  Modern drugs and treatment have largely eliminated most of these illnesses, but at that time many children spent long periods in hospital recovering from operations and illnesses, often in sanatoriums.  On their return home, a considerable number of these children were too frail to cope with the rigours of their local schools.  In addition there were those suffering severe malnutrition or who had been in contact with tuberculosis.

Inspired by the Open Air Movement local authorities built special schools for these children throughout the country.  Most of these however were residential schools, built in rural areas and were called Open Air Schools.

Western Park School was a purpose built school in the middle of a large park, which, unlike others was built as a day school.

The school was built on a long site of two and a half acres with all of the buildings out on separate island sites.  These consisted of six classrooms in three pairs, a toilet and cloakroom block, the administration block with dining room, kitchen upstairs (school meals were only introduced in other state schools during the war), a nurse’s room and shower area, stock room, staff room/office and head teacher’s room.  Further along the site was the bed shed.  These were usually open three-sided sheds but we were very lucky in that our bed shed was enclosed on all four sides with really large rooms and stock rooms at either end.  Further down the site was nurse’s unit where some pupils had daily sun lamp treatment or breathing exercises and postural drainage.

The rooms were heated with coke stoves and apart from the head’s, secretary’s, nurse’s, shower block room and toilet block every window in the school opened completely from top to bottom the whole way round. Staff never took their coats off in winter.

Staff at that time were made up of head, deputy head, five teachers, secretary, nurse, bath orderly, kitchen staff, caretaker and cleaners, full time gardener (Mr Harold Singleton who laid out the beautiful garden, took football with the boys and was guest of honour at our Golden Jubilee reunion – the only person of the original staff), and an assistant gardener.

Mrs E Griffiths