St John the Baptist Primary School was a Church of England school for infants and juniors in this small northern town in England. The voluntary aided school closed in 2004 as a result of amalgamation with other schools in the area. The school has stood empty ever since. At its peak, 220 children attended the school through the ages of 3 and 11, including perhaps most famously Frank Randle, a comedian and contemporary of fellow Lancastrians George Formby and Gracie Fields, who enjoyed immense popularity during his lifetime and an icon of pop culture during wartime Britain.
For a long stretch of time, almost all children in the country attended small, state run schools such as this before graduating to secondary schools. These schools were organised by the church, which in 1944 introduced the requirement for daily prayers in all state-funded schools, but later acts changed this requirement to a daily "collective act of worship". This also requires such acts of worship to be "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character”. The term "mainly" meant that acts related to other faiths could be carried out providing the majority were Christian. Voluntary Aided and Voluntary Controlled faith schools followed the same National Curriculum as state schools, with the exception of religious studies, where they were free to limit it to their own beliefs.
Until 1997, the UK funded only Christian or Jewish faith schools (Muslim schools existed but were privately funded), but the 1997–2007 Labour Government expanded this to other religions, and began using the term "faith school”. A voluntary controlled school such as this were maintained by a foundation or trust (usually a Christian denomination) that had some formal influence in the running of the school. However, the change in national culture during the turn of the century had started to reflect a sharp drop in national worship and therefore the importance of faith in children’s education became less integral by the decade. In the early 1900’s when the school was founded, it was built as a direct part of the local parish, and admittance was granted upon recognition of the families that attended the church itself. A hundred years later and this was no longer a reliable method of recruiting children for local primary schools across the country. By 2011, only about one third of the 20,000 state funded schools in England were faith schools, approximately 7,000 in total, of which 68% were Church of England schools and 30% were Roman Catholic. St John the Baptist closed due to the simple fact that the parish no longer had the numbers to justify operating the school, and the remaining students joined with similar small schools in the town in order to form either a larger state run school or an academy.
Shortly after the closure of the school, following the 2010 Academy Act, many faith schools converted to Academy status, and sometimes became known as Faith Academies. All academies could set pay and conditions for staff, and were not obliged to follow the National Curriculum. However the Department for Education "will not approve any application where we have any concerns about creationism being taught as a valid scientific theory, or about schools failing to teach evolution adequately as part of their science curricula." Coming from an era where almost all subjects were taught in cooperation with religious disposition, this revolutionised the circumstances in which young students were being educated and paved the way for a more modern and independent ideology for young people, regardless of their religious background. As a result, however, hundreds if not thousands of these parish schools are now scattered across the country. Many have already found new purpose as fashionably restored homes or community centres, and some now open to the public as local markets in smaller towns. In some northern villages such as this one, many of the buildings are still waiting for some signs of a clear future, but few are as untouched or idyllic as St John the Baptists. It’s easy to imagine the sound of small footsteps echoing around these corridors, and the names of the children still shown above the coat hangers and tiny chairs make it all the more easy to imagine a place that was once so familiar and still hangs in the memory of older generations today.
