Hulme Grammar School

If you remember this as two schools, or as Oldham Hulme, it is now one school under one name. Hulme Grammar School took its present name in 2023 and admitted its first co-educational Year 7 the same September, having taught boys and girls separately for most of its history. It is an independent day school for three to eighteen, with the senior school on Chamber Road in Oldham and the pre-prep and prep a short way off at Thornycroft House. There are around 580 pupils.

The school traces itself to 1611 and a single room of local Pennine stone, which industrial Oldham eventually grew around and closed. The present school opened on Chamber Road on 1 May 1895 to forty-eight boys and twenty-eight girls, taught in separate classrooms in the same building, paid for out of the William Hulme Trust after a local solicitor went and asked for the money. It was a direct grant grammar school until 1976. In 1940 it took in a group of evacuees from Guernsey who stayed five years and were known in school as the Guernsey Boys.

A child joining at eleven goes into one of three forms and one of four houses named after benefactors, chasing the Needham Trophy. The Head of Year 7 also carries Years 8 and 9, so the same person follows a child from eleven to fourteen. The day starts at a quarter to nine, runs five periods with a full hour for lunch, and ends at a quarter to four. Entry is by two papers, one English and one combining maths with non-verbal reasoning, then an interview for stronger candidates. There is a swimming pool on site and a forest school. It suits a child who wants a school that has been there a long time and makes no fuss about it.