Bentham Grammar School
Bentham Grammar School was an independent school in Bentham, North Yorkshire, England. The school was founded in 1726 but closed in 2002 due to dwindling pupil numbers. History Bentham Grammar School was founded as a charity in 1726 in the village of Bentham by William Collingwood, a gentleman of York. His will provided for two masters, an Upper Master and a Lower Master, both ‘educated according to the rule of Oxford and Cambridge’. It educated, first the boys of the local villages and later, in the twentieth century, also fee-paying boarders from a wider area. Girls were educated in small numbers until the 1930s when the school became fully co-educational. The first school was situated on School Hill in High Bentham, but after the Elementary Education Act 1870, the building was required for state elementary education and the school moved to a site at Moon's Acre in 1878. The Factory Acts of 1838 and 1844 required children working in the local textile mills to have some half-day education, and that provision was catered for, as was the developing Victorian curriculum. Even so by the early twentieth century the school still only numbered 40–50 pupils. The first two headmasters of the