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Our View of Wolverhampton Grammar School
This is a school with an infectiously purposeful and upbeat feel. It focuses every energy on obtaining the best for its pupils without the need for swanky window dressing. Tech integration is some of the best we’ve seen, with devices cleverly used to extend and inspire learning throughout.
Where is Wolverhampton Grammar School?
Located in the suburbs of Wolverhampton, the school sits on a 25-acre site, immediately surrounded by trees and greenery that give way to a more urban feel – this is undoubtedly a city school. The main building – a late-19th-century red-brick – is impressive.
The school serves a broad geographical catchment from Penkridge to the north and Stourbridge to the south. It reflects the diverse make-up of the area, both culturally and economically, helping it to maintain its position in the community and its strong relations with the wider city. Most pupils live locally, getting to school by foot, bus or being dropped off by parents.
The site contains large sports pitches, a cricket square and athletics track that are overlooked by many of the buildings. The junior and infants’ schools are located adjacent to the main school building, just beyond the entrance for visitors to the senior school. Pupils in Year 3 upwards share classrooms and facilities, and from Year 4 they share teachers, which greatly helps the transition from junior to senior.
School Headmaster
Former deputy head Nic Anderson stepped into the role of head in December 2023 after a short spell as acting head. As a former pupil here, a long serving teacher with multiple responsibilities and now as headmaster, he knows WGS inside-out. He is approachable and authentic with a genuine and infectious enthusiasm for a school which is very evidently his absolute passion. Community and relationships get top billing on his agenda, telling us ‘we need to feel that we are together in order to go forward’.
He’s a very visible head, regularly leading junior school assemblies as well as the senior, popping up at swimming galas, coaching the debating team, being available at drop off or pick up times and even championing his pupils on BBC Radio 4. Celebrating people is his superpower and he strives to help every pupil feel seen and valued for who they are. Stepping back from teaching maths (he was once a finalist for maths teacher of the year) has been a hard wrench but his ambition of making a difference to each and every pupil remains unchanged in his new role.
Mr Anderson is endearingly unpolished; he’s an attentive listener and very well encapsulates the down-to-earth and hardworking ethos of the school. His passion for the difference WGS can make to pupils and their community is exemplified in the school’s current focus on raising a sizeable bursary fund from alumni to support families who are finding the economic climate particularly challenging.
He's a huge fan of ‘We are WGS’ days, where pupils come to school in their own clothes as ‘it allows pupils to celebrate who they are’, whether that’s in their favourite football kit or wearing clothing that represents their culture or heritage. ‘If pupils are smiling and enjoying life, I’m happy’, he says with a smile. ‘It feels the same as when a child suddenly understands something I’m teaching in maths, I am genuinely so excited by it’. Whilst academic performance is undoubtedly high on his agenda, giving children a ‘whole education’ with all the necessary skills is what really drives him. He’s a deeply committed head, passionate about his pupils and striving to do the very best he can for a school he clearly loves.
Wolverhampton Grammar School Admissions Process
Around half of the initial senior-school cohort are children who have arrived via automatic transition from
the junior school (while no exams are taken to progress between the two schools, pupils can sit for senior-schools scholarships if they wish).
For the other half coming from elsewhere, the school is ‘slightly selective’ and external applicants take entrance exams in English, maths and verbal reasoning. Most join in Year 7, but parents are always encouraged to apply at different entrance points if there is space.
About 10 per cent of pupils leave after GCSE (usually for
sixth-form college or state grammars), which opens up some highly coveted spots – prospective pupils must get an average of 5.5 points in their seven best subjects at GCSE to be in with a chance.
Academics and destinations
Lessons last 50 minutes and rotate on a two-week timetable. The culture of learning here is evident, and every one of the 10 or so lessons that we saw in progress was delivered with energy and a notably bright intonation. Teachers introduced themselves and succinctly summarised the lessons before continuing with a natural warmth. Individual iPads were used creatively and seamlessly, with one class downloading apps from the school store to assist with a campus tree-mapping survey for geography, while a biology class switched between images on their devices and laminated revision cards on their desks. Staff can use Apple’s Classroom app to monitor what each child is doing on their screen in real time, ensuring pupil engagement and allowing early intervention if anyone is struggling.
The Opportunities for Assisted Learning department (OpAL) is a superb resource offering provision in many forms, from organisational and presentation skills to structured learning support for specific subjects or a venue for pupils for whom study leave at home is too unstructured.
Results are strong across the board and are supported by excellent reporting, with pupils clearly benefiting from the individual attention and space for one-to-one tuition here. More than 79 per cent of last year’s GCSEs were graded 9-6, while an incredible 42 per cent of sixth-formers secured A*/A at A-level and notched up an 100 per cent pass rate across all A-levels and Cambridge technical diplomas (offered alongside A-levels in IT and sport & physical education).
Sixth-formers have their own centre where they learn, study and socialise with the popular café serving up breakfast, lunch, snacks and drinks to keep them fuelled and firing on all cylinders. Chemistry remains the most popular subject choice, with maths and biology following closely behind. Class sizes are capped at 15, but the school will create enough sets to accommodate everyone.
Last year, just under half of Year 13 leavers went on to o study everything from medicine and architecture to engineering. This year the school has split careers and higher education into two distinct functions, offering students a comprehensive CEIAG programme (Careers, ¿´Æ¬¿ñÈË, Information, Advice and Guidance). Pupils build their skills over their entire school journey within the senior school, with the careers and higher education department providing a very comprehensive and creative programme, bolstered by support from an extensive network of alumni.
Co-curricular at Wolverhampton Grammar School
At the start of the academic year, every pupil gets to choose which sports they would like to do – something that’s particularly good for less sporty types, according to our guides. Football, hockey and netball are the predominant winter sports, with athletics, rounders and cricket in the summer, but there is a huge range on offer, from judo to fencing and fives, and the campus boasts a range of pitches, an Astro and climbing wall. Girls’ football and cricket are hugely popular, and teams have done very well competitively in recent years. The majority of fixtures are against other local day schools.
The main playing fields are overlooked by the Anglo-American Pavilion (originally funded by Old Wulfrunians based in the US), which has a sleek glass-fronted viewing balcony, and the dance studio is stunning, with loads of natural light. There is a visiting external dance teacher for both junior and senior schools across all year groups.
Art is extremely impressive, with a regularly updated series of large and striking pupil artworks dotted around the school that wouldn’t look out of place in a London gallery. The art department is thriving – up to 40 per cent of students choose art at GCSE and there’s an on-site facility to make canvases of any size. A-Level pupils are encouraged to find their own favourite discipline and are coached to achieve their individual best with regular and ongoing feedback via their own personal Teams channel. Keen artists can become members of the Viner Society, holding workshops for younger pupils and curating exhibitions (one of which ran at Wolverhampton Art Gallery). The school recently created an inaugural exhibition of alumni artwork spanning eight decades, and the A-Level work we saw laid out for assessment was genuinely stunning.
D&T is just as brilliant. We saw pupils working on creating wooden spatulas and designing acrylic mobile-phone holders, and the department boasts an incredibly passionate lead member of staff and an industrial-cadets scheme in partnership with HS Marston Aerospace, which challenges enquiring minds with a problem whose potential solutions are presented to the board.
The art and drama departments are located across the road in a large, shared building accessed using biometric fingerprint recognition. The Hutton theatre is sizable and brilliantly designed, with adjustable tiered seating and full-length blackout partition curtains, both of which can be configured in all manner of ways to suit the performance. Impressive productions are matched by fabulous movie-premiere style posters designed by the in-house graphic design department. Curriculum drama builds student confidence in public speaking, and cleverly designed exercises get pupils talking about people who inspire them and sharing their culture and stories with their peers. Until recently, drama was only offered in Years 8 and 9 and then at A-level, but now it can be taken as a GCSE too, and numbers are building every year.
The music department hosts a whopping 200 individual music lessons every week and the brilliant ‘endangered instrument’ scheme gives Year 7 pupils a whole term of free lessons on instruments that have lost a little of the limelight. Clubs and orchestras abound and there’s even a barbershop choir run by the sixth formers.
There’s a huge amount to get stuck into here, with more than 100 activities, societies, clubs, academic workshops, trips, expeditions and sport tours. A comprehensive booklet details what’s on offer, from Pokémon to knitting and creative writing, and this year sees the 26th-annual 190-mile Coast to Coast relay, which requires a commitment to 16 weeks of serious training for the demanding 24-hour challenge from its Year 10 participants.
Wolverhampton Grammar School Community
The newly formed house structure forms the backbone of the school community, with pupils allocated two in-house tutors who stay with them until sixth form, building on their relationships and providing a constant point of contact. Add in the weekly timetabled wellbeing sessions for all pupils, and you can be in no doubt that pupil care is a high priority. The wellbeing head Maggie Keeley ensures that pupils are taught everything from mindfulness techniques to CPR training and recognising unconscious bias. She is fiercely passionate about the role, loves what she does as ‘it’s exactly what the children deserve – it's the gold standard’. But more importantly, she recognises that ‘if children don’t feel happy and safe, they can’t access all the things that the school does so well’.
The school has a very ‘community-focused mindset’, with many pupils aspiring to careers in service of some kind, but WGS undoubtedly leads by example – such as the genuinely remarkable community initiatives created and run by head librarian Zoe Rowley. Her aim is to ‘inspire every pupil to read’ but this isn’t confined to WGS – she works with 50 schools in the area that either visit or are provided with resources she often creates herself.
Local families are often invited in after school to read, enjoy a meal related to the theme of the book or take part in literacy activities, often going home with a specially recorded audio version of the book to help families for whom English is not their first language. This is partnership and not patronage, demonstrated at an impressively high level and indicative of the core values championed by staff and pupils alike.
This is proudly not a ‘posh’ school and the pupil body is representative of the community – they are from very diverse backgrounds and 60 per cent identify as BAME.
And finally....
Uninterested in swagger, Wolverhampton Grammar proudly focuses on what really matters. Advanced tech strategies, community partnership, academic rigour, multiculturalism and the wellbeing of all are evident in abundance. Rarely have we encountered such consistent and natural ebullience from every member of staff we met. If you seek confidence without arrogance, results without razzamatazz and a broad and wide-ranging curriculum which allows every pupil to shine, then we strongly suggest you take a look.