Place
Calderstones School is an English comprehensive school located opposite Calderstones Park on Harthill Road in the Liverpool suburb of Allerton.
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Calderstones School is an English comprehensive school located opposite Calderstones Park on Harthill Road in the Liverpool suburb of Allerton. The school has several notable former pupils, including music producer Guy Chambers, the architect Sir James Stirling, and founding Beatles member John Lennon.
Calderstones School is an English comprehensive school located opposite Calderstones Park on Harthill Road in the Liverpool suburb of Allerton.
The school has several notable former pupils, including music producer Guy Chambers, the architect Sir James Stirling, and founding Beatles member John Lennon.
The school was founded in 1921 as Quarry Bank High School for Boys and its first intake of 225 pupils was on 11 January 1922. The first headmaster of the school was R. F. Bailey (an old Etonian), who organised the school on the principles of public school houses. Subsequently, the first year boys' house was named Bailey.
In September 1967, Quarry Bank High School for Boys merged with Calder High School for Girls (a girls' grammar school on an adjacent site on Harthill Road) and Morrison Boys' secondary modern school (on Mather Avenue in Allerton), and adopted the name Quarry Bank Comprehensive School. The same year saw the abolition of the school's house system, whereby the pupils were divided between Mersey, Esmeduna, Wavertree, Sefton, Allerton, Childwall, Aigburth and Woolton houses.
In 1985, the school merged with Aigburth Vale High School, Aigburth, which led to the school operating at four sites with 1,800 pupils; it was also then that it adopted its current name. Aigburth Vale was previously a grammar school with around 600 girls. In 1989, the school divested itself of its Aigburth and Morrison facilities, retaining only the original Calder House and Quarry Bank estates. A new building to replace the Morrison wing was built within the existing school site. The former Morrison site is now home to a Tesco superstore, and the site of Aigburth Vale High School was redeveloped as flats.
In 2001, the school underwent a major refurbishment as part of a Private Finance Initiative scheme. The entire site was overhauled, with the old Calder Wing largely demolished, leaving only Calder House which now houses the sixth form. An Arts Wing was built to house the English, MFL, Arts and Music departments. The former Quarry Wing was divided into two separate buildings. One is Quarry House which houses the ICT and History departments, and the main office for the school. The classroom core of Quarry Wing is now known as the Science Wing and houses a number of science labs. Also in 2001, the school was given Science College status under the Specialist Schools Programme (abolished in 2011).
John Lennon, rock musician, singer/songwriter, author and peace activist, and one of the founding members of The Beatles, attended the school after passing the 11-plus exam.
Lennon's band with Paul McCartney and George Harrison, before settling on the name The Beatles, was earlier formed under the name The Quarrymen, inspired by a line from the Quarry Bank school song. Lennon, at age 16, had formed the group with several friends from the school. After The Beatles became successful, for a while the school hid evidence of Lennon's attendance. In 2025, a teacher at the school said "When John left, he was that much of a nuisance and a bully and that much of a poor student, the school staff didn't want to acknowledge that he ever went to the school and removed any trace of him."
Margaret Ursula Jones, archaeologist
Judith Kelly, artistic director of London's Southbank Centre and Master of St Catherine's College, Oxford from 2025
May Maple (1914–2012), electrical engineer, president of the Women's Engineering Society
Diana Walford, haematologist and Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford from 2002 to 2011
Source: Calderstones School (CC BY-SA)
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Calderstones School Alumni John Lennon
Calderstones School Alumni John Lennon
