Old Swinford Hospital

Old Swinford Hospital is a voluntary aided state boarding and day school in Oldswinford, Stourbridge, in the West Midlands of England. It was founded by the ironmaster Thomas Foley—the traditional date of 1667 marking the start of building—and admitted its first pupils in 1670; it has operated continuously since. It is one of a small number of state boarding schools in England, where the state meets the cost of education and parents pay only for boarding. The school was established as a charitable "hospital"—in the 17th-century sense of an institution for the poor rather than the sick—to clothe, board and educate 60 boys from poor families in Worcestershire and Staffordshire, and was historically known as Foley's Blue Coat School. For some two centuries its defining purpose was to place its boys in apprenticeships, each leaving at fourteen with a blue coat, a Bible and a premium paid to his master, and pupils wore the blue coat of the 17th-century apprentice until 1929. After a period of severe decline in the first half of the 20th century, the school became a voluntary aided school in 1950 and was rebuilt around a residential and academic model in the following decades. It was among the first schools in the country to adopt grant-maintained status in September 1989, admitted girls to the sixth form from 2004, and became fully coeducational in 2021. The original foundation buil

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