To serve the needs of the growing population of the parish in the Hanley Swan area, St Gabriel’s school was built on church land in 1862, also serving as a Chapel of Ease (a church building for the ease of the local community) until St Gabriel’s church was built in 1874.
Initially the school catered for children up to the age of 14 and by 1901 the average attendance was 114, including about 25 boys from the nearby Home of the Good Shepherd. That year an inspector’s report noted, “Vigorous steps should be taken to compel more regular attendance on the part of many scholars, and to put a stop to illegal employment”. Children often stayed away to help pick fruit or work on the farms. The following year the inspector reported, ‘Children in good order; work proceeding satisfactorily. The offices require through cleaning and lime washing.’
In 1929 it was reorganised as a junior mixed school for children from 4 to 11, but in 1947 its infants department was transferred to St Mary’s Primary School, returning when that school closed in 1972. The school was extended in 1957 and plumbed cloakrooms installed, replacing a latrine block fitted with two long planks into which holes had been cut, one side for boys and the other for girls, emptying into a channel that had to be regularly cleaned out.
Today:
The school caters for around 100 children and has a teaching staff of seven. Recent extension work has improved office and staff-room facilities and enlarged the computer suite. In 2005 St Gabriel’s achieved the highest added value rating of any primary school in Hereford & Worcester and came in the top 1% of the 13,700 schools in the country. ‘Value added’ is a measure that shows the degree of improvement achieved by pupils between the ages of 7 and 11. The Department for Education and Skills says the “value added measure gives a greater indication of a school’s effectiveness than its overall results.’”
