It’s pretty rare to get a clear view of any of Great Ayton’s old buildings without some car or other parked in the way. Take the village library, for example—now known as the Discovery Centre since the community took it over. Originally, this building was the British School, set up to educate the poorer children from Ayton and the surrounding areas. It stayed a school until 1972 before turning into the library. If you poke around, you can still spot the old school sign behind the building in the car park.
The school itself has a fascinating history. It was funded in 1842 by Thomas Richardson, a local Quaker made good, retiring back the village after making his money in banking in London. He did all sorts of good things for Ayton, like setting up four almshouses at the corner of High Green (though they’re named after his cousin, John Pease) and fixing up the waterfall on the River Leven after a flood messed it up. As well as being instrumental in setting up the Friends’ School.
The British School was pretty big for its day and didn’t align with any specific religion, which was unusual at the time. It was part of the British and Foreign Schools Society, a group started by Joseph Lancaster that focused on non-conformist education. Back in 1851, it had 63 boys and 41 girls enrolled.
By the late 1800s, Great Ayton had a few schools—the British School, the Anglian Marwood School, and the Friends’ School, which was a Quaker boarding school. In 1908, the Edward Kitching Council School opened up with three classrooms, and the British School became just for infants. Kids started there at age five and moved to Marwood or Edward Kitching around age seven, depending on where they lived in the village. Most kids left school as soon as they could at fourteen, but a few gained scholarships to grammar schools like at Guisborough for the boys and Middlesbrough High for the girls. Some even got village scholarships to the Friends’ School, which later started accepting more local kids as paying day students.
After the 1944 Education Act, everything shifted. Kids now left the village schools at eleven and either went to Stokesley Secondary Modern or to one of the grammar schools. By 1968, Roseberry County Junior School opened, and the two older schools just took in infants. Then in the early ’70s, when North Yorkshire switched to a comprehensive system, the eleven-plus exam was scrapped, and all Ayton kids ended up at Stokesley School.
Source: o’Sullivan, Dan. “Great Ayton: A history of the village”. 1983. ISBN 0 9508858 0 0.
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