Seashell Trust
charitable organisation in Stockport, UK

Seashell Trust (formerly Royal Schools for the Deaf) is a charity in Cheadle Hulme, Greater Manchester, England, for children, young people and adults with sensory impairment, profound and multiple learning difficulties, and profound communication difficulties. It is the oldest deaf children's charity in North West England and operates Royal School Manchester and Royal College Manchester, as well as children and adult care and residential homes including a supported tenancy.
Schools
The Trust's special school is called Royal School Manchester, the Trust's independent specialist college [ISC] is Royal College Manchester. In addition, the Trust also operates ten adult care homes and seven children's homes.
History
The original school was established in 1823 by Robert Phillips, a Manchester merchant, with the assistance of fellow merchant William Bateman. It attained its royal status by Queen Victoria in 1897, and Queen Elizabeth II was its patron. It first opened in Salford in 1825, with 14 children, but it became necessary to move to a larger building, in Old Trafford, where the foundation stone was laid in 1836. It opened on 21 June 1837.
The school remained there until 1956, when a new campus was built in Cheadle Hulme. The school in Trafford remained open until 1982 and the charity now operates solely from the one site.
“Seashell Trust” enters the record as charitable organisation in Stockport, UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Seashell, Trust and charitable can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7441816. VIAF identifies the subject as 5151715659313782678. The Library of Congress control number is nb2018001553. Authority coordinates are 53.361, -2.214. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1823, 1897, 1825 and 1836.
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This entry incorporates text from “Seashell Trust” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.