The school opened in September 1956 as a
secondary school with a
GCE stream. It stood in eighteen acres of playing fields in a rural area five miles south west of
Wolverhampton. The first stage of the building works was finished in 1957. The first headmaster was Harold Holroyde,
MA. He retired in March 1975.
Anwar Shemza, the Pakistani artist, worked as a teacher at Ounsdale between 1962 and 1979. In September 2002, the school was granted
specialist school status as an
Arts College. This has led to the addition of a slightly modified school motto:
Pursuing excellence by developing the creativity of learners through and in the arts. In March 2015, the school became one of the founding members of the Invictus Education Trust, and converted to
academy status. Since being founded in 2015, the Invictus Education Trust has grown to In 2019, the school changed its name from Ounsdale High School to Wombourne High School. As a part of the
Department for Education's school rebuilding program, Wombourne High School received a share of £1 billion of allocated grant money to use towards the demolition and build of a new
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) building. The announcement of the school's inclusion in the scheme by
Gavin Williamson took place in June 2020, with the plans for the building being approved by
South Staffordshire Council at the start of 2023. The build began in May 2023 and is currently underway. == Notable former pupils == •
Christopher Pincher, Conservative MP for
Tamworth from 2010 to 2023 •
Helene Hewitt (née Banks), climate scientist •
Wendy Sadler, science communicator •
Lydia Thompson, rugby union player •
Alex Hughes, cricketer • Prof.
Sarah Spurgeon OBE
FREng FIET, Professor of Control Engineering since 2016 at
University College London and from 2008 to 2016 at the
University of Kent, Professor of Engineering from 2002 to 2008 at the
University of Leicester, President from 2014 to 2017 of the
Institute of Measurement and Control • Adam Lavender, Producer in the video games industry working at
Ubisoft Leamington, whose work includes being part of the BAFTA-nominated
Guitar Hero Live development team,
Call of Duty and Tom Clancy's
The Division 1 and 2 ==References==