Tertiary education There are two
further education colleges in the Dudley Borough:
Dudley College of Technology,
Halesowen College. The borough is also home to the
King Edward VI sixth form college in Stourbridge, originally a
grammar school established in 1552, converting to a sixth form centre in 1976. A small number of secondary schools in the borough offer sixth form facilities, while several others did so until the beginning of the 1990s when the local authority decided to concentrate post-16 education in further education colleges. In March 2011
Eton College and Star Academies announced their intention to open one of three sixth form colleges in Dudley, subject to funding through the
Department for Education’s Free Schools Programme. Since the
University of Wolverhampton closed its Dudley campus in 2002, the metropolitan borough is the largest district in the UK without its own university. Several projects in the Castle Hill area of the Dudley are now linking with local universities. The Black Country & Marches Institute of Technology opened in September 2021, with a focus on higher level engineering courses, it partners
Dudley College of Technology,
University of Wolverhampton,
University of Worcester, In-Comm Training Services Limited and Avensys UK Limited. A Higher Education Centre for Health & Care is proposed as a partnership between Dudley College of Technology and University of Worcester and expected to be open for Autumn 2024.
Primary and secondary education There are 104 Dudley Council schools: 78 Primary, 40 of which include a Nursery Unit (24 Primary
Academy); 19 Secondary (of which 15 are Secondary
Academy Schools) and 7
Special Schools. Pupils transfer to secondary school at the age of 11, although between 1972 and 1990 pupils in the north of borough transferred to secondary school at the age of 12, and from 1972 to 1982 there was a three-tier education system in Halesowen where pupils entered first school at 5, middle school at 9 and secondary school at 13. The borough had well over 30 secondary schools on its creation, although this was quickly reduced as a result of the introduction of the comprehensive system a year later, which resulted in a number of schools being merged or closed. By September 1990, however, the number of secondary schools in the borough had fallen to 22 as a result of the closure of Gilbert Claughton and Mons Hill Schools and the merger of High Park and Longlands Schools in Stourbridge to form Ridgewood High. A year earlier,
Castle High had been formed in the town centre of Dudley from a merger of
The Dudley School and
Blue Coat School; this new school also took in some of the former Gilbert Claughton and Mons Hill pupils. The 1980s had also seen the closure of some the borough's less popular and smaller primary schools, with the older buildings mostly being demolished and the more modern ones being converted for community use. The closure of
Cradley High School in Halesowen in July 2008 saw the number of secondary schools in the borough fall to 21, dropping to 20 with the closure of
Pensnett High School in July 2012, and to 19 when the Coseley School closed five years later. When the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley was formed, many primary schools existed as separate infant and junior - or first and middle schools, but by 1990 virtually all of the separate schools had been merged to create full age-range primary schools, the last separate infant and junior schools to merge were Red Hall in Lower Gornal in January 1997. There are no grammar schools in the borough since the mid-1970s, all secondary state schools have been
comprehensive. The former grammar schools in the borough were Dudley's Boys Grammar and Girls High Schools (merged with Park Secondary Modern School in 1975 to form The Dudley School, which in turn merged with The Blue Coat School to form Castle High in 1989), Sir Gilbert Claughton Grammar School in Dudley (which adopted comprehensive status in 1975 before closing in 1990), Brierley Hill Grammar School (actually situated in Kingswinford; it has been known as the Crestwood School since adopting comprehensive status), King Edward VI Boys Grammar School in Stourbridge (which is now a mixed sixth form college), Stourbridge Girls High School (which merged with the Boys Grammar School and Valley Road Secondary Modern School to form Redhill School), Halesowen Grammar School (which merged with Halesowen Technical School to form Earls High School) and High Arcal Grammar School in Sedgley (which survived as a comprehensive school). The sole independent school in the borough is the
Elmfield Rudolf Steiner School in Stourbridge, which follows the
Steiner Waldorf curriculum. The
Old Swinford Hospital school in Stourbridge is one of only 34 state-funded
boarding schools in England, with education being funded by the
local education authority (LEA). ==Healthcare==