Wellington High School and Com Ed Centre

Wellington High School is a co-educational secondary school in Wellington's CBD, New Zealand. It serves roughly 1500 pupils. The Wellington College of Design (later the Wellington Technical School) was formed in 1886 to give a more practical education than that provided by the previous schools. In 1905, it began enrolling both boys and girls, becoming New Zealand's first co-educational secondary school. It is one of only two secondary schools in Wellington (the other being Onslow College) and one of only a few in the country that does not require students to wear a uniform. Many of the existing structures are neo-Brutalist in style and date from the 1980s.  Wellington High School and the institutions from which it arose play an important role in New Zealand's public education history. What it is now is Wellington High School was established by Arthur Dewhurst Riley in 1886 as the Wellington College of Design. It was New Zealand's first technical school; the students were teens who had entered the workforce following elementary school, and the evening lessons were trade-focused. Students have to pay a fee to attend. The school was renamed Wellington Technical School in 1891, and it relocated from Mercer Street to Taranaki Street in 1922. Riley was a New Zealand pioneer of technical and vocational education, and his ideas impacted the Manual and Technical Instruction Act of 1900