Community Life

SIR WILLIAM PERKINS’S SCHOOL, CHERTSEY

BY SHEILA BINNS

This independent senior day school for girls in Chertsey has a fine reputation for the high achievement levels of its students.  However, the school began very differently. 

It was founded in the eighteenth century in the centre of Chertsey by a wealthy local merchant (a tallow chandler), Sir William Perkins (c1656-1741), who also held various government posts, including that of ‘Serjeant of Wine Cellar’ between 1695 and 1702.

In 1703, he acquired 8-16 Windsor Street and in 1724 he had the houses rebuilt.  Number 12 (Curfew House) was purpose-built as a school with a residence for a master. Perkins founded the school in 1725 for 25 poor boys of the town. They were to be taught reading, writing and arithmetic as well as the catechism of the Church of England. He also paid for their clothes.

1736 saw expansion, with a new building and a residence for a schoolmistress. This became Sir William Perkins’s second school, founded to educate 25 poor girls, remarkable for being very early in the education of girls. However, he may have doubted that Chertsey had sufficient deserving poor girls as the new school was permitted to draw from the adjoining parishes of Thorpe, Egham and Cobham.  Like the boys, they were to be clothed and taught reading, the catechism and also ‘plain work’.  Seemingly, writing and arithmetic were not seen as necessary skills for girls. 

Sir William Perkins endowed the schools generously and they must have been run efficiently as by the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were sufficient funds to consider an extension and improvements.  The schools had outgrown their Windsor Street premises and a new building was constructed on Guildford Road.  It opened in 1819 for 225 boys and 100 girls.  

In 1908, the entire school closed and, for six years, there was no Sir William Perkins’s School.  In that time, a new building was constructed, a new Board of Governors appointed, adjacent land for playing fields acquired and new management protocols drawn up.  In 1914, a young headmistress and three more teaching staff were appointed, opening the new Sir William Perkins’s Secondary School for Girls for 46 girls in the same year.

The school went on to become one of the first girls’ grammar schools in the country and became independent in 1978.  Today, the school has over 600 pupils aged 11 to 18.  With additions and modernisations, the school remains on the site to which it moved in 1819, now extending to 13 acres. 

It has a tradition of academic excellence and is frequently at the top of Surrey’s examination results tables. New girls join one of four ‘houses’, named after historically influential women.  A wide range of subjects is taught, many in purpose-built departments with continuously updated equipment and technologies.  Education at the school is much broader than its academic curriculum with a wide range of co-curricular activities offered.  There are state-of-the-art facilities for drama and music and sports facilities include the adjoining private sports fields as well as a boat house at Laleham Reach.

For a while before 1850, the old building in Windsor Street became the home of Sir John Chapman, a noted Windsor surgeon and mayor of Windsor.  It was subsequently occupied for considerable period by families who ran a drapery business from numbers 8-10.  A memorial plaque to Sir William Perkins remains over the door of Curfew House including the words:  ‘For Fifty Children clothed and taught. Go & do likewise. 1725.’