The Hemel Hempstead School


The Hemel Hempstead School is a secondary school and sixth form located in the town of Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom.

Admissions

The school has roughly 1200 students, including a sixth form, and over 115 members of staff.
Recent heads have been:

Grammar school

The school was officially opened on 14th October 1931 as Hemel Hempstead Grammar School. It was opened by Lady Cicely Gore, the Marchioness of Salisbury and wife of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 4th Marquess of Salisbury. Another grammar school, the Apsley Grammar School, opened in the town in 1955.

Comprehensive

It became a comprehensive school in 1971, when schools in the town were reorganised.

Buildings

The original Hemel Hempstead School building opened in 1931, along with a canteen and gymnasium block to the west and north of it. In the early 1960s an outdoor swimming pool was installed. In the latter half of the 1960s a new assembly hall, canteen, sports hall and changing rooms, and technology block were constructed. Work was completed shortly before the school became comprehensive.
In 1974 a “temporary” languages block was opened, which had been built on the land of the old canteen building which had been disused since 1969.
In the late 1960s, a 15th-century barn to the south of the school fields was reconfigured and put back into use as a Music block.
In 1990 a new Technology block was built adjacent to the former swimming pool.
In 1999 the swimming pool was demolished and replaced with car parking. In the same year a new block containing Maths, Geography and ICT classrooms was constructed next to the old Sports hall, with 12 classrooms.
In 2004 a new Sixth Form block was completed, essentially an extension to the Main Block, that replaces storage space.
In 2008 and 2010 new Drama and Food Technology blocks were opened.
Sometime around 2017, an astro turf playing field was completed on the site's southern grassland.
In 2019, the Heath Barn building referred to above was sold, with the music department moved to a newly built two storey mixed use block commonly referred to as "North block". In May of the same year, a new sports hall was opened on the site of the old sports hall.

House system

The pupils are divided into one of the 7 house groups each named after local villages :
The houses compete against each other to win annual events such as sports day, house drama/house art, house music/house dance, house science and house Christmas decorating competitions, as well as a house book challenge for Years 7 and 8, and a reading challenge for Years 7 through 9. For three years in a row, from 2017 to 2019, Chalfont won house sports.
When the school was a grammar school, there were four Houses - Dacorum, Salisbury, Tudor, and Halsey.

Notable former pupils

Hemel Hempstead Grammar School