The Corsham School is an Arts College

Arts College

Arts Colleges were introduced in 1997 as part of the now defunct Specialist Schools Programme in the United Kingdom. The system enabled secondary schools to specialise in certain fields, in this case, the performing, visual and/or media arts...

 and large secondary school

Secondary school

Secondary school is a term used to describe an educational institution where the final stage of schooling, known as secondary education and usually compulsory up to a specified age, takes place...

 & academy in Corsham

Corsham

Corsham is a historic market town and civil parish in north west Wiltshire, England. It is at the south western extreme of the Cotswolds, just off the A4 which was formerly the main turnpike road from London to Bristol, between Bath and Chippenham ....

, Wiltshire

Wiltshire

Wiltshire is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It contains the unitary authority of Swindon and covers...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. It has 1387 students enrolled, with over 200 in the sixth form facility.

Background

Students from the marketing town of Corsham and those of nearby villages attend.

The school's website including a school timetable and links to the school's ELE

Virtual learning environment

Defined largely by usage, the term virtual learning environment has most, if not all, of the following salient properties:* It is Web-based* It uses Web 2.0 tools for rich 2-way interaction* It includes a content management system...

 account.

Layout

The school is split into 5 different blocks.

• S block or the Science Block - A three floored building in which Science is taught. S Block also contains the main hall, one of the schools' two gyms and several offices.
• T Block or the Technology Block - Where Art, Food Technology and Photography is taught.
• R Block or the Richards Block - Named after Clive Richards, who taught at the school for a significant number of years. It is the newest building in the school. English, Maths and Geography are all taught in R Block.
• L Block or Library Block - Contains the main Library, the staff and reprographics rooms as well as Main Reception and the offices of the senior staff.
• H Block or the Humanities Block - The largest building in the School in which History, RS/PSHE, Modern Foreign Languages, Drama, ICT and Music are taught, among others. H Block contains the second gym and a dance studio, usually used for the dance aspect of PE. It also contains two drama studios, two fully equipped Music Rooms and the sixth form
  Sixth form
  In the education systems of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and of Commonwealth West Indian countries such as Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, Jamaica and Malta, the sixth form is the final two years of secondary education, where students, usually sixteen to eighteen years of age,...
  
   common room.

Academic standards

The Corsham School was described as "exceptional" in increasing the number of pupils attaining top level GCSE grades by Bob Wolfson, Wiltshire's education director, in January 2004. More than two-thirds of Corsham's pupils achieved five or more A* to C grades at GCSE

General Certificate of Secondary Education

The General Certificate of Secondary Education is an academic qualification awarded in a specified subject, generally taken in a number of subjects by students aged 14–16 in secondary education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and is equivalent to a Level 2 and Level 1 in Key Skills...

 in 2003, a big improvement from just over half the students in 2002.School Standards Minister David Miliband

David Miliband

David Wright Miliband is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament for South Shields since 2001, and was the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs from 2007 to 2010. He is the elder son of the late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband...

announced that he was keen to see the strategy spread to most schools in the country.

In 2009 The Corsham school got an 'outstanding' Ofsted report.