In 1974, local government reorganization saw the end of the West Riding Council, and Dinnington moved under the auspices of Rotherham. In the course of this transition, a dispute seems to have emerged regarding the ownership and use of the pool, with the the school taking the opinion that it'd quite like the pool to itself. The public who'd paid for the pool naturally kicked up a bit of a fuss. A four year dispute came to a head in 1978, when Rotherham Council threatened to pull the plug on the £30,000 per year running costs, and ceased building work on new changing rooms. The school had no choice but to allow the public in. An uneasy balance was maintained until the early 1990s, when the pool was divorced from the school, and DCS finally dropped swimming from the curriculum.

The demolition of Throapham Manor and surrounding buildings took place in the late '70s, with the land used for new housing. The 1980s saw little change to the campus, with the Library being the only addition after the Sports Hall. The hoped-for laundrette seems not to have arrived, and the 6th Form study was to effectively steal the Admin block library when the new library arrived.

In 1982, the school was condemned for its poor condition: roofs leaked, making floors slippery; broken windows were left unreplaced; equipment in the Art department lacked the appropriate safety guards; PE had to deal with occasional floods. The school has had to juggle these sorts of problems pretty much consistently. It always had trouble with vandalism and build quality, even in the '30s. But as populations and surface areas increase, so do the problems. In the '80s, every House had at least one pinball machine. Constant theft meant that there was only one left in the entire school by 1997.

Conservative Educational Reform:

There were some changes in the early '90s as the 1988 Education Reform Act kicked in, and this was most obvious in teaching styles. The National Curriculum saw an increasing reliance on ticking boxes and distributing photocopies, as long established teaching plans had to be revised to meet Key Stage guidelines.

In 1993, DCS was designated a Technology School by the DES. It was the first such designation in Rotherham, and probably the last, as all future Technology Schools had to opt out of local government control to get it. Dinnington just slipped in under the net. The deal provided DCS with specialist equipment and machinery in order to run NVQ courses in CAD and Manufacturing. On top of this was £183,000 for new Technology equipment, along with a year's free maintenance. In exchange, DCS had to provide a course in Diploma Foundation as a kind of advert for GNVQs. PSE was dropped to make room for it.

A couple of years later, the revamped Technology Block arrived, containing the school's first IBM-compatible PCs.