The Croydon Archives:
Timeline 1949 - HMI School Report

In early December 1949, John Ruskin Grammar School was subject to another official inspection - this time by the new Ministry of Education. Page 2 provides a good overview of the school and the system in which  it operated.

  The report is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, and very different to the present school inspection regime. The Alumni should be able to identify Mr. Lowe, Mr. Hancock, Mr. Smith, Mr. Chinnock, Mr. Alexander and Mr. Pearce, Mr. Gee, Mr. Peacock, and others.

  This was the latest report to be located in the Croydon Archives - there are none, unfortunately, with a more recent date. It is suspected that Mr. J. C. Lowe kept this document privately on his bookshelf as it probably would have been the first HMI inspection during his career as head at JRGS. He would have been very proud of it. (Notice the handwritten comments in the margins, almost certainly attributable to Mr. Lowe. The report was probably the one in the headmaster's office when the Shirley site closed in the early Nineties.)
  Nowadays, HM inspections come in two sections. The "Full Monty" (generally accessible to only HM, Governors and possibly local authority members) plus a more general one that would be available to the public.

  Click on any of the following images to access a full-size version of the corresponding page.
WARNING: these are reasonably large JPEG images; each one is between 145K and 210K bytes.

And here is as single-volume 3 Mbyte PDF files of all 16 pages.

  The report is also mentioned on page 7 of the April 1950 JRGS School Magazine.

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