Woodlands Academy, Coventry 3.79

Woodlands Academy was a boys secondary school situated in west Coventry in the West Midlands, England.HistoryThe school was purpose-built in 1954 as one of the first comprehensive schools in the country, by the collaboration of two local educational establishments, Templars School and Coventry Technical College. It opened on the morning of 21 September 1954. Historic links to these two can be seen in The Woodlands School coat of arms. Pupils were aged between 11 and 18. It remained a boys school; girls went to the nearby Tile Hill Wood School.In 2003, the school was awarded specialist status as a Sports College.In the main building there was a copy of the Guernica painting, which illustrated a stylised view of the 1937 Bombing of Guernica in Basque Spain by German and Italian bombers in the Spanish Civil War, in which the artist Pablo Picasso clearly expressed his abhorrence to the military suppression of the Spanish people.In 2003, Woodlands School adopted a new system where all the pupils took their SATs and GCSEs a year early compared to most other secondary schools in England. The percentage of pupils gaining five grade A*-C GCSEs rose from 36% in 2007 to 61.7% in 2008. This led to them being ranked the fifth most successful comprehensive in the city.