St Peter’s Church of England Primary School in Harrogate has received a ‘good’ Ofsted rating.

The school was inspected in March and the newly released report said St Peter’s is “a welcoming and friendly school” where children are taught “an ambitious curriculum” and “‘enjoy their learning and achieve well”.

Inspectors noted the adaptation of lessons to provide effective support for all children including those with additional needs and those for whom English is an additional language.

They added children “talk with maturity about a range of issues”, “show empathy and care for each other” and that there is, “a range of opportunities for children to develop their talents and interests”.

Paul Griffiths, headteacher at St Peter’s CE Primary School, said;

“It is privilege to lead a wonderful team of dedicated and hardworking professionals who work tirelessly to provide the very best for children and their families.

“I am immensely grateful to the whole staff team for all they do. As a school we are very fortunate to have a hugely supportive parent body and wonderful children who help to make St Peter’s a very special place. We look forward to building on the many positives from the recent inspection to continue to improve our facilities and provision for the benefit of all.”

Paul Griffiths St Peter’s head teacher

The school is part of Yorkshire Causeway Schools Trust, founded in 2015 the company covers nine schools in Harrogate and Craven.

Jane Goodwin, CEO at Yorkshire Causeway Schools Trust, said:

“This Ofsted outcome is welcomed by the School and the Trust as a representation of the fantastic School that St Peter’s is. As a happy and caring environment where everyone works hard together, all children enjoy and benefit from the quality of learning and wider experiences that staff create for them.

“St Peter’s is a shining example of a Yorkshire Causeway school, and I am hugely proud of their achievements.”

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A diplomat from Harrogate has been appointed the UK’s new ambassador to Iraq. 

Stephen Hitchen takes over the role from Mark Bryson-Richardson, who has been in post since July 2021. 

On his Twitter feed, Mr Hitchen said:

“Delighted to be appointed as the next UK ambassador to Iraq, really looking forward to getting to know this fascinating country and building UK and Iraq’s partnership.”

The son of a solicitor and Methodist lay preacher, Mr Hitchen has deep family roots in the area, and was a pupil at St Peter’s CE Primary School and Ashville College. 

Upon graduation he joined the civil service and worked for the Ministry of Defence for eight years, including 18 months’ full-time Arabic language training. 

Following postings to Cairo and Kuwait, he became head of the Iran political team in the Middle East and North Africa directorate of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). In 2012 he was made head of Middle East reporting in the same department. 

After three years as counsellor regional affairs based in Amman, Jordan, he became the FCO’s director of national security for the Middle East and North Africa, and lastly was appointed director of the counter terrorism department at the renamed Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

In a video post on the British Embassy’s Facebook page, Mr Hitchen, who is fluent in Arabic, said:

“The mission of our embassy is to help our friends in Baghdad and Erbil to strengthen the prosperity, and stability and sovereignty of Iraq. […] I’m hugely looking forward to my arrival in Iraq.”

Mr Hitchen will take up his post next month. Most UK ambassadors to Iraq over the last 20 years have spent two years in the post. 

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A Harrogate school is celebrating being selected for refurbishment after winning a place on a government scheme.

St Peter’s C of E Primary School, in the town centre, is one of 239 schools in the country to be chosen to be part of the School Rebuild or Refurbishment Programme.

St Peter’s is the only school in the Harrogate district to have been chosen under the scheme. Wetherby High School, which is in the City of Leeds district, will also receive funding.

School business manager Amanda Foster said:

“This is a beautiful Victorian building, but it’s never really had enough money to keep it in good condition. There’s water ingress, single-glazed windows, the roof has never been looked at, and the boiler is 51 years old.

“If they can make us watertight, replace our windows and get us a new boiler, we’ll be delighted, but we’ll have to wait and see.”

No figure has yet been put on the amount of funding that will be allocated to the school. The Department for Education will assess later this year what works need to be done and how much money will be awarded.

Headteacher Mr Paul Griffiths said:

‘We are delighted with this news. A huge amount of time and work goes into preparing these applications and we are delighted to have been successful.

“Since joining the school in September 2021, a number of improvements including new outdoor play facilities, a new nurture room and a new classroom have been successfully completed. We are thrilled that we will be able to continue to invest significantly in the building for the benefit of staff, children their families and the wider community.

“We look forward to keeping everyone updated with news of the scope and timing of the works as the year progresses.”

Built in 1883, St Peter’s was Harrogate’s first purpose-built hospital. The hospital was closed in 1932 and then bought a few years later and turned into a school.

Last year, the school, which has 267 pupils and is part of the Yorkshire Causeway Schools Trust, spent £280,000 on a major refurbishment project, which included removing external fire escapes, creating additional classrooms and a new outside play area.

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A professional musician who grew up in Harrogate will return to the town in eight days to give a lunchtime recital.

The London Horn Duo will play at the Wesley Centre on January 9 as part of the venue’s monthly concert series.

The duo consists of Kerin Black and Jo Withers, nee Greenberg, who went to school in Harrogate and whose family still live in the town.

Jo began playing the violin aged four and the piano aged five before learning the French horn almost by chance In her final year at St Peter’s Church of England Primary School.

Her sister, Sarah, played the clarinet in Harrogate Grammar School’s orchestra and band. The school’s head of music at the time, Brian Hunt, told Sarah he had lots of violinists but was short of brass players and if Jo would learn French horn to a reasonable standard he would take her on the band’s foreign tour when she joined the grammar school.

So she took lessons with Stephen Price, which proved to be the start of her career as a professional musician.

After attending the Guildhall School of Music and Drama she freelanced in London for 10 years before taking an extended sabbatical to home-educate her children.

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Jo now plays for film and TV sessions, orchestras including the LSO, RPO and London Chamber Orchestra and is a regular guest principal for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

For the past 18 years she has been a member of the orchestra of English Touring Opera, and travelling round the UK with her children, Charli and Nathan and their grandparents Mike and Maureen Greenberg.

The London Horn Duo was created in 2020 when Ms Black and Ms Withers formed a lockdown bubble two decades after meeting as students in the Britten-Pears Orchestra. Ms Black grew up near Washington DC.

Their programme at the Wesley Centre includes:

Otto Nicolai – Sonata in A Minor

Bernhard Krol – Laudatio (Kerin solo)

Mozart – selection from Twelve Pieces for Two Horns K.487

Catherine Likhuta – I Threw a Shoe at a Cat: Theme, Waltz, Yazz,
Finale (Jo solo)

Tickets cost £10 on the door or in advance from Andrew Hitchen on 01423883618 or email a.hitchen81@gmail,com

St Peter’s Church of England Primary School in the centre of Harrogate has completed one of the most substantial refurbishments in its history.

The school, which has 267 pupils, has spent £280,000 removing external fire escapes, creating additional classrooms and a new outside play area which includes parkour equipment.

Built in 1883, St Peter’s was Harrogate’s first purpose-built hospital. The hospital was closed in 1932 and then bought a few years later and turned into a school.

Today it is part of the multi-academy Yorkshire Causeway Schools Trust which includes St Aidan’s Church of England High School and a number of other Church of England and community schools in the district.

The refurbishment work meant multiple projects at the same time — all crammed into the summer holidays to avoid disrupting the children’s education during term time.

Headteacher Mr Paul Griffiths said:

“We are delighted to have completed this ambitious schedule over the summer holiday to enhance our facilities for the benefit of children, families and our dedicated and talented staff team.

“With fantastic support from Yorkshire Causeway Schools Trust we been able to achieve such a huge amount in a short space of time.

“We love the deep history and period features of our Victorian building with its lovely high ceilings and great picture windows and are delighted to be modernising this historic building for the benefit of children and families.”

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The school’s business manager Amanda Foster told the Stray Ferret that there was still more to be done at St Peter’s but for this round of work they’d thought hard about their priorities:

“We had to balance what needed to be done in terms of structural work versus what would directly benefit the children – such as the improved play area.

“With a building this old there are still major restoration needs so we are applying for more grants to get that work done.

“The work we’ve achieved this summer will make a massive difference to our pupils”

Part of the new playground area at St Peter’s

It is doubtful whether anyone has known more about Harrogate’s people and places than Malcolm Neesam, who died on his 76th birthday this week.

Malcolm, who wrote about a dozen books and numerous other publications about the town, dedicated much of his life to telling Harrogate’s story. He did it better than anyone and will be remembered as the town’s greatest historian.

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the buildings and people that shaped Harrogate but he was also gentle and modest, and never boastful or condescending in print or real life.

Underpinning it all was a deep love for the town, and in particular the Stray.

Born in a nursing home on Ripon Road in Harrogate on June 28, 1946, Malcolm’s father worked for a rubber company that manufactured soles for footwear.

Sunday afternoon walks with his mother stimulated his interest in history at the age of six or seven. She would often talk about things they passed. “I didn’t need a playground,” he once said. “I had the Stray.”

He attended St Peter’s Church of England Primary School, “a very happy little school”, as he described it, and then Christ Church Secondary School for Boys. The school, which was situated between the Empress roundabout and Christ Church on the Stray, amalgamated with St Peter’s Secondary School for Girls to create St Aidan’s Church of England High School more than 50 years ago. Retirement flats now occupy the site.

In his last year at Christ Church, Malcolm’s parents noticed an advert for an assistant at Harrogate library and thought his developing interest in history would make him suitable.

Photographed in London in 1988. Pic by Benedict Hess

After three years in that role he accepted a post at Leeds University studying archives and librarianship. He later attributed his thoroughness at gathering source material for books to his training as an archivist.

Malcolm then moved to Hereford for four-and-a-half years to set-up the city’s first children’s library service before moving further south to Northwood, in the London borough of Hillingdon close to the Metropolitan line, to work as an archivist for the Duchy of Lancaster.

Music librarian

He did this for three years before going to York, shortly before local government reorganisation in 1974, to become city music librarian.

But when reorganisation changed everything, Malcolm was offered a post by the new local authority as county music librarian, which involved buying music for county library services. Being a great lover of classical music, he was perfectly suited.

He stayed in York until 1996, overseeing new methods of administration, storage and repairs as technology changed and vinyl was replaced by cassettes and then CDs in North Yorkshire libraries. All the time he commuted from Harrogate.

He admired York’s decision to effectively pull out of North Yorkshire local government and become independent in the 1990s. Malcolm hated the trend towards ever more remote forms of local government, which will culminate in the creation of North Yorkshire Council next year and the abolition of seven district councils, including Harrogate Borough Council. He felt the more decision-making left Harrogate, the more the town lost control of its wealth and character.

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In 1996 he received an offer to work for an American company called Alumni Holidays, which arranged holidays for former university students.

He had done some guiding in York, which proved useful in his new role in which he gave lectures on subjects such as Scarborough, York and the Yorkshire Dales, Yorkshire architecture and Yorkshire literature. Alumni Holidays was horrified by his initial omission of James Herriot so the author was eventually added to his list of topics.

Malcolm worked for the company on a freelance basis for 10 years but the Madrid train bombing in 2004 severely disrupted business by leaving many Americans too afraid to travel to Europe.

Full-time writer

In 2006 he decided to concentrate on writing full-time. He had written short stories at school but didn’t let anyone see them. His writing career had begun in 1973 when the Library Association commissioned him to write a guide to children’s sci-fi called Into Space. It went to nearly every library in the country.

A founding member of the Harrogate Society, which later became Harrogate Civic Society, he was asked by local firms such as Ogden, Raworths and William Woods to write books for them. He also undertook research for plaques. His writing career, he said, “grew in stages”.

Harrogate in Old Picture Postcards was published in 1992, followed by Exclusively Harrogate in 1994 and Harrogate: A History of the English Spa from the Earliest Times to the Present in 2001. His works also included a centennial history of Harrogate Grammar School in 2003.

During this time he became, in the words of Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Andrew Jones, “the chronicler of our town”.

The two books of which Malcolm was proudest are Harrogate Great Chronicle 1332-1841, which was the product of 40 years work, and Wells and Swells: The Golden Age of Harrogate Spa, 1842–1923, which was published in April this year. His beloved Harrogate Club named its dining room in his honour at the book launch. By then, Malcolm was in the advanced stages of the cancer that would claim his life and it was a deeply emotional occasion at a place that meant so much to him.

Malcolm Neesam at the launch of his final book, Wells and Swells.

He started work on a third volume, covering Harrogate’s history since 1923, fully aware he was unlikely to finish it.

Before Malcolm, William Grainge, who died in 1895, was considered to be Harrogate’s foremost historian. Grainge had published books and short publications about the town in the 1860s and 1870s, but nothing substantial. Malcolm described Grainge’s style as “too chatty” whereas he focused more on the history.

He and the late Harold Walker, a historian and one-time editor of the Harrogate Herald, set up the Walker-Neesam archive, ensuring their collective research could stay for ever within the town.

His vast collection of papers and photo library will go to Harrogate’s Mercer Art Gallery. Organising them won’t be an easy task: thousands of brown envelopes assigned alphabetically by subject took up an entire room at his home.

Malcolm gave a typically modest answer when asked why he only wrote about Harrogate, saying: “Some writers can turn to anything. I can only write about things that interest me.”

Freedom of the Borough

Malcolm was instrumental in establishing the listing of many buildings in the town and in establishing the first conservation area. He was also the founder historian of the Harrogate Brown Plaque scheme.

He was a member of the Harrogate Club from the 1990s and adored the place and its history. Arthur Conan Doyle once played billiards there.

Harrogate Borough Council awarded him the Freedom of the Borough in 1996 for his services as a historian. He supported numerous local organisations, including Harrogate Dramatic Society and Harrogate Theatre, often sitting on their committees.

Unfailingly polite, he was nevertheless often reserved and diffident in public. He rarely talked about his private life but close friends say he had a keen sense of humour, which could border on the macabre at times, and was an excellent cook.

Besides music, he had a passion for reading, especially non-fiction history and Victorian fiction, such as Dickens, Thackeray and Jane Austin.

But his lifelong passion was Harrogate. He loved its wide streets, the Stray and shops, and felt the population was just about ideal.

He never married. His elder sister, Shirley, who had two sons, died three years ago. Malcolm’s two nephews live in Burnley and East Sussex.

Asked where he was happiest, he said: “It may seem obvious but just sitting on the Stray under a tree.”

Malcolm Neesam, historian and author, born June 28, 1946, died June 28, 2022

Pupils from six Harrogate schools have said what they love about Harrogate in a new film that aims to pull more people into the town centre.

Children from St Peter’s, Coppice Valley, Birstwith and Admiral Long, Oatlands, Richard Taylor and Western primary schools took centre stage in the ‘I Love Harrogate’ film.

The film is being projected onto the window of an empty shop window on the side of Victoria Shopping Centre, across from Beulah Street, until February 23.

It aims to capture the imagination of some of Harrogate’s youngest residents and encourage more people town.

Paul Griffiths, head of St Peter’s Church of England Primary School said:

“We were delighted to be invited to contribute to this video, and our children really enjoyed saying why they love Harrogate.

“We are very fortunate to live in Harrogate, and even luckier that our school is in the middle of the town. On our doorstep we have The Stray, the library and its gardens, and of course all the great shops, restaurants and entertainment venues, all within a short walk.”

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The installation has been put on by Harrogate Business Improvement District. The BID is currently offering grants to entertainers with a “wow factor” to liven up Harrogate town centre’s streets.

It is hoping more events and installations will drive footfall into the town centre. It is offering the grants in order to cover any costs incurred as long as the idea satisfies funding criteria.

Matthew Chapman, Harrogate BID manager, said:

“The I love Harrogate video is the first in a series of films that we are making with those who live and work in the town. It is also a reminder that for many years Harrogate has been held up as one of the happiest places to live.

“I love Harrogate will be shown on a continuous loop in the window of the empty shop unit, and we hope those who star in it will encourage their family and friends to come into town to view it, and of course to take the opportunity to shop, eat and drink.”

The Rogers’ almshouses in Harrogate have undergone a £200,000 refurbishment and welcomed three new residents.

Bradford mill owner George Rogers built the almshouses in 1868 for former employees when he retired to Harrogate.

They have provided low cost housing to people in need ever since.

Harrogate district mayor Trevor Chapman yesterday opened a new almshouse, which was created by converting an old laundry on the site.

Two other houses have been refurbished, meaning three new residents will move into the 15 dwellings, which are opposite St Peter’s Church of England Primary School on Belford Road.

The work was funded by a £95,000 grant by Homes England, which is the government housing agency, and funding from the Rogers’ Almshouse Charity, which owns the site.

The one-bedroom homes are run by a board of trustees, which includes the Dean of Bradford Cathedral, the vicars of Christ Church and St Peter’s Church in Harrogate along with a team of volunteers.

To qualify for an almshouse, residents must be aged over 60, have lived in Bradford or Harrogate for at least three years and meet hardship criteria.

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Guests from Homes England and the Almshouse Association were among those present at the opening of the new homes.

Schoolchildren from St Peter’s, who traditionally support the almshouses  by carol singing and presenting gifts at Christmas, sang at the event.

Stuart Holland, chair of trustees at Rogers’ Almshouse Charity, said:

“The grade two listed building is admired by so many as they pass by.

“They look at the brown plaque, enjoy the award winning garden and dream of living in such beautiful houses.”

Children from St Peter’s C of E Primary School in Harrogate are singing loud in hope of an England win on Sunday.

The Year 1s and 2s at the school have been learning to sing and sign the football anthem with teachers all week.

The ‘Three Lions’ song has become a chant for football fans across the country to sing together following the team’s continued success.

The children are keeping their fingers crossed England will bring back the trophy after Sunday evening’s final against Italy.

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St Peter’s school children are staying hopeful for an England win this weekend.