In a way, the arguments that surrounded the 1957 amalgamation of the school were slightly academic, as a merger between the Modern and the Secondary department of the Tech was already on the cards. The idea of a Comprehensive in Dinnington had been mooted by January 1956, and in January 1957 (the same month that the school became coeducational), the agreement went through to buy 31.166 acres from Mr Fisher, a local land-owner. Most of the land would be seeded as playing fields, and a new school complex would be built between the Secondary Modern and the Technical College. The name of this new, merged school was determined by an LEA vote in 1962: the authority having to choose between Dinnington High or Dinnington Comprehensive. The result was 8-4 to the former, and Dinnington High School was born.

The West Riding Education Authority was, as already noted, one of the more progressive, and it was a leader in comprehensive reform. Dinnington would be the first Comprehensive School in the Rother Valley area, with the Tripartite System being systematically disassembled. To emphasise its educational breadth (and suitability as a replacement for the Grammar School system) the school would expand upon its old House-based pastoral system with a physical, collegiate House Base campus; very classy.

The Phase I Extension:

The new school was designed by J. Hardie Glover of Sir Basil Spence, Glover & Fergusson, Edinburgh. The company, who had been commissioned for the build c.1954, had since risen to some renown through such works as Sussex University and the celebrated Coventry Cathedral rebuild. In March 1958, by way of research, Hardie Glover visited schools in Coventry designed on the house principle, while the potential problem of subsidence was also a considered factor in the design. The finished plan saw the school divided into 60'x60' blocks, including five House Base units linked by "bridges".  It would be built in three phases, to include "admin rooms, classrooms, workshops and three gymnasia linked to a playing field area". The construction would be prefabricated, consisting of a steel frame and wooden slides, with concrete floors and roofs. Black timber and external "padding" would be highlighted by grey-painted steelwork and a "large expanse of windows". 

The contract for the build went to Wade Construction Co. of Sandygate, Wath on Dearne, in 1961, and the completion date for Phase I was set as June 1963. Phase I would consist of accomodation for 1600 pupils, with 300 pupils per house (that leaves 100 to be spread round the rest of campus, and perhaps suggests the intended loss of the old school building), plus a new gym and school hall. An initial budget of £249,000 had inflated to £300,000 by the time it opened, with £50,000 set aside for building costs.

Phases II & III would follow later, including a third floor to most of the campus, and two more gyms (revised, by popular demand and much wrangling, to one more gym and a swimming pool (costed at around £13,000)).

Work began in June 1961, with the leveling of the land, including part of the old playing fields. The build failed to finish on time, and the new school opened about a fortnight late on 23rd September 1963, with the Main Hall and New Gym still unbuilt. There were 1633 pupils to cater for, which is 33 more than Phase I alone could take.

The Sir Basil Spence Archive describes Dinnington School as being "of a steel frame construction with brick infill. The buildings are externally clad in Oregon pine boarding with Oregon pine windows." A photograph from the [RCAHMS]'s "Canmore" database, shows [the school as it looked in May 1967], with most of the vertical paneling unpainted (and the trees still saplings). The archive likens Dinnington to Thurso High School in Caithness, though the similarity is tenuous. It also describes it as "stylistically reminiscent of the buildings designed as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain", which again requires a certain vividness of imagination. A number of schools designed by the partnership at the same time, including the Colley and Yew Lane secondary schools in Ecclesfield, likewise bare little resemblance to Dinnington.

The Main Hall was completed around Christmas, and the New Gym wasn't ready until after Easter. Both are of a noticeably different building style to the rest of Phase I. The House Bases and Admin Block share a common prefab style (analysed in more detail here). The Reception, Main Hall, and New Gym are built from a different system to the rest of Upper School. They share the same sort of girder frame-work as other Upper School buildings, but the actual structure of the Main Hall and New Gym is clearly different to that of the house-bases; most obviously the brickwork and the different style of windows. The bricks are "New World" facing bricks from Maltby Metallic Brick Co. Ltd.

Between the Main Hall and the New Gym is what appears to be an aborted flyover. This notion is supported by the rush to finish the buildings around it. If it was to be a flyover, then the plans for the New Gym and Main Hall were definitely changed, because not only does the Main Hall not have a second floor there, but also the flyover structure does not come flush to the wall of either building (in contrast to the other flyovers).

Another possibility though is that it is a covered walkway. A contemporary build to DHS is the University of York, whose campus is joined together by covered footpaths. The canopies there look similar to the structure at Dinnington, and double as conduits for various cabling and suchlike. A comment in the governors' minutes says something along the lines of 'moving about outside will still be necessary until phases 2 and 3 are complete'. Assuming Lower School was to be kept, the suggestion is that it would be joined to Upper-School by some enclosed structure or other. Of course, more likely is that Lower School was intended to be replaced, so we probably can't draw as much from this statement as we'd like. But it's certainly the case that the structure provides cover between entrances of the Gym and the Hall, and either way, the intention is to create a weather-proof route through a cohesive campus.

This intention was soon scuppered...

At the end of 1963, the decision was taken to shed the eleven commandeered teaching spaces at Throapham Manor, the Tech, the Nursery and the Junior Mixed School, and replace them with 12 Terrapin classrooms (6 units of two classrooms) erected in 1964 on a short-term hire basis. As many of you will know, the short-term hire ended up being about 35 years.

The longer Terrapins at the back may have been built in 1961 for the Secondary Tech to use as Agricultural Science classrooms. Or these may have been other Terrapins on the College campus.

The Formal Opening:

A formal opening event took place on 14th November 1964 (a year after the actual opening of the school) withj celebrity educator, mountaineer and panel-show presenter [Jack Longland MA], Director of Education for Derbyshire, doing the opening. He compared the new building to the Parthenon, saying DHS was "fit, beautiful and apt for its purpose", the "first of its kind in the country", and "helping to raise the standard of public building".

I'll take advantage of the 40 year rule and the fact that he's dead to tell you that Longland was only the third choice for the job. The governors had originally hoped for [Lord James of Rusholme], at that time Vice-Chancellor of contemporary educational establishment the University of York. The Archbishop of York was second choice, with Jack Longland third on the list. The others considered were: Lord Newsom (author of the Newsom Report of 1963, which proposed greater relevance of curriculum to the lives of disadvantaged working class pupils, and brought about the Newsom course - an ostensibly vocational curriculum for less academic kids), [Sir John Wolfendon] (former public school headmaster and chair of a number of government committees on education, but most famous as the author of the Wolfendon report of 1957 which effectively recommended the legalisation of homosexuality in the UK) and Lord Scarbrough (educationally minded and locally seated peer (Doncaster), responsible for the Scarbrough report of 1946: seemingly an inquiry into the teaching of Oriental Studies).

Longland offered a cup to the school, and though I don't remember a Longland Cup competition, I expect such a thing existed. Mrs M A Butterfield, Head of the Board of Governors gave the Butterfield Cup, which was awarded to the House with the most Merit Cards. And while we're on the subject, there was also the Rastall House Championship Shield which was dedicated to the memory of Mrs A Rastall, the first chair of the Governors (or of the Kiveton Park District Education Sub-Committee, to be strictly accurate).

The merger saw an increase in the length of the school day. Changes in the school uniform were met with less disapproval by pupils. Girls, for instance, were happy that they could now wear black stockings and be "with it".

Not everything about the merger ran smoothly. Tensions were evident between the staff of the Modern, the staff of the Tech and the growing ranks of newly employed qualified teachers. Mr B Fox writes:

"Diktats from Mr Moreton [the new Headmaster] that everyone had to use the New School staff room only (and ignore the one in the old wooden secondary modern building) marked the reluctance of the SMod teachers to mix. They thought they'd be shafted with an inlfux of new people with degrees. Where would they get promotions?"

Indeed, the vast majority of Departmental Headships went to new (graduate) staff. The older (largely unqualified) staff were pacified with the pastoral Head of House positions, with each house divided equally between a Tech and a Modern teacher: Athorpe and Hatfield had House Masters from the Modern and House Mistresses from the Tech, while Osborne and Segrave had the opposite arrangement (coincidentally, Osborne and Segrave's internal layout is also a reflection of that of Hatfield and Athorpe - see House Construction).