Kings Monkton School - history
Kings Monkton School is one of the oldest independent schools in south Wales. The school can say with some pride that it has been educating children since 1870, when Henry Shewbrook opened a boys’ day and boarding school in Roath, Cardiff, close to the city centre. That school became Monkton House School and generations of pupils were taught at its site in The Parade right up until 1997.
When Monkton House was established, Cardiff was a boom town - a rapidly expanding metropolis, growing rich on the export of coal and the coal trade itself was the catalyst for the expansion of commerce generally. A thriving town of Cardiff’s size needed young people with academic qualifications to fill the posts in business, commerce, education and industry that were allied to the city’s phenomenal growth.
A few years after Monkton House opened its doors, a commercial college was established in the same area. Skerry’s College prepared pupils for the professional examinations that would give young people the necessary qualifications they needed to enter commerce and the civil service. For a short period Skerry’s College and Monkton House actually occupied premises next door to each other in The Parade. We do not know if this co-existence was amicable but we do know that by the 1920s Skerry’s College had changed its name to King’s College and had moved premises.
For the next 70 years Monkton House and King’s College existed as friendly independent school rivals until the early 1990s when the governors of both schools decided that there was more to gain from unity than competition. And so, in 1994 the two schools merged and Kings Monkton School came into being. For the first three years Kings Monkton operated from its three school sites until in 1997 it had the opportunity to purchase the site of Our Lady’s Convent School and bring together all its pupils on a single site. In 2003 the school added a new wing to its premises to accommodate its expanded sixth-form numbers and to increase its provision in physics, technology, music and history.
So a lot has happened in the past 136 years but Kings Monkton still shares the ethos of its early beginnings. Cardiff has changed from a thriving coal-exporting town to an equally thriving commercial and administrative centre and in the course of the last 100 years it has also become a city and, of course, a capital. Life in the 21st century is very different from that of the 19th but the challenges for young people remain the same and Kings Monkton will continue to serve the needs of today’s pupils and prepare them for the demands of the future.
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| 20 December 2007 | Norman Riches – A cricketing hero! |