Sir John Lawes School
school in Hertfordshire, UK
Sir John Lawes School (also known as SJL for short) is a mixed state secondary school with academy status in Harpenden, United Kingdom. The school has close links to three other local secondary schools, Roundwood Park School and St George's School, Katherine Warington School, and to the neighbouring Manland Primary School, and is active in the community and abroad.
History
Thanks to the effort of, and largely at the expense of, John Bennett Lawes, founder of Rothamsted Research, work was begun to start educating Harpenden's youth in 1847. The "British School" was founded on Leyton Road (now Park Hall) in 1850. The school soon began to outgrow this site. In 1894 the people of Harpenden elected a school board to manage the British School, now overcrowded and run-down. A site for a new school was bought for £725 on the corner of the newly built Victoria and Vaughan Roads. The building was completed in 1896 and opened on 12 January 1897, with room for 140 boys at the northern end, 120 girls at the southern end and 140 infants in the centre.
In 1919, the Boys', Girls' and Infants' departments at Victoria Road School were reorganised into Senior Mixed School and Junior Mixed School. A campaign began for a new school and Hertfordshire County Council purchased land on Manland Common.
“Sir John Lawes School” enters the record as school in Hertfordshire, UK. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Lawes and School can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3485216. Authority coordinates are 51.822, -0.346. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1847, 1850, 1894 and 1896.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sir John Lawes School” 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.