LOUGHTON: Schools celebrate 60 years (From This Is Local London)

LOUGHTON: Schools celebrate 60 years

8:48am Thursday 28th June 2012 in Where I Live By Clare Hardy, Senior reporter

THE roots of two schools were remembered by past and present pupils and teachers during a day of celebrations.

A tree was planted to mark the 60th anniversary of The White Bridge Junior School in Greensted Road, Loughton, on Friday (June 22), by former governor Lady Murray.

Class photos and documents from earlier days were on display at the school as part of the celebrations and a letter from the original infants’ head teacher, Miss Bone, now 94, was read out during a special assembly.

Junior school head teacher Katherine Ward said: “I think the children had a sense of the school when it first opened.

“Both schools have had photos up and I showed them pictures of the building being built, which has excited their imagination.”

The school, along with The White Bridge Infant School next door, was opened in 1952 and named after a bridge over a section of the River Roding which is now Roding Lake.

David Wixley, 65, of Goldings Road, Loughton, who now serves of Epping Forest District Council and has been a governor at the junior school since 2004, was one of the school’s first pupils.

“When I first joined, it wasn’t completed,” he said. “I remember a teacher saying ‘look through the window – that will be a classroom when it’s finished’.

“The class numbers were much larger then. There were about 40 children. They didn’t have teaching assistants in those days.

“There was corporal punishment, which I don’t agree with, and one teacher used to favour hitting children with a slipper.”

But he said his school days there had been very happy and he hoped some of the current 430 pupils would also meet up in 60 years’ time.

“The schools mean a lot to people of my generation and I’m sure that’s the same with the children there today,” he added.

Click here to follow the Epping Forest Guardian on Twitter