Passmores Academy is a 11-16

secondary school A secondary school, high school, or senior school, is an institution that provides secondary education. Some secondary schools provide both ''lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper secondary education'' (ages 14 to 18), i.e., b ...

Harlow Harlow is a town and local government district located in the west of Essex, England. Founded as a Planned community, new town in 1947, it is situated on the border with Hertfordshire, and occupies a large area of land on the south bank of the ...

Essex Essex ( ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the East of England, and one of the home counties. It is bordered by Cambridgeshire and Suffolk to the north, the North Sea to the east, Kent across the Thames Estuary to the ...

. The academy has an annual intake of 240 pupils in Year 7, and approximately 1,000 pupils. It featured in the 2011 television series Educating Essex. The principal is Natalie Christie.

History

The school was originally Passmores Comprehensive School, later becoming Passmores School and Technology College, until its conversion to Academy status in September 2011 when the name was changed to Passmores Academy. The school reopened for the 2011–12 school year on a new site which is approximately one mile from its old site. This new site is the home of a £25 million new building which was constructed over a two-year period from 2009 on the old Brays Grove Secondary School site. In November 2008 the school was graded as Outstanding by Ofsted, having been graded as Good in November 2005. It received a Good in May 2018. In September 2013 Purford Green Primary School and Potter Street Primary School became part of Passmores Cooperative Learning Community as well as becoming feeder schools. In 2018 The Downs Primary School and Nursery joined.

Curriculum

There is a two-year Key Stage 3, with French and Spanish the only languages offered.

''Educating Essex''

The school was the setting for a seven-part

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation. It is state-owned enterprise, publicly owned but, unlike the BBC, it receives no public funding and is funded en ...

reality TV show, '' Educating Essex''. The show follows a group of

GCSE The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is an academic qualification in a range of subjects taken in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, having been introduced in September 1986 and its first exams taken in 1988. State schools ...

pupils, and the staff who teach them, as they face the most important year in their education. The school was fitted with 65 fixed cameras – from the corridors to the canteen, and from the headteacher's office to the detention hall. Recording with the fixed cameras lasted for seven weeks. This was used alongside occasional standard filming by camera crews from September 2010 to August 2011 and edited into a seven-part series.

Bereavement support during the COVID-19 pandemic

In 2020, the school was aware of the need to support children and staff who had had family members die during the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

References

External links