At Mulberry Stepney Green, Maths Computing & Science College, we run a house points system that rewards good student behaviour and sporting achievements. The school is divided into 4 houses:
BRUNEL
The history behind the house name:
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, (9 April 1806 â 15 September 1859), was an English mechanical and civil engineer who built dockyards, the Great Western Railway, a series of steamships including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship and numerous important bridges and tunnels. His designs revolutionised public transport and modern engineering.
Though Brunel’s projects were not always successful, they often contained innovative solutions to long-standing engineering problems. During his short career, Brunel achieved many engineering “firsts”, including assisting in the building of the first tunnel under a navigable river and development of SS Great Britain, the first propeller-driven ocean-going iron ship, which was at the time (1843) also the largest ship ever built.
Brunel astonished Britain by proposing to extend the Great Western Railway westward to North America by building steam-powered iron-hulled ships. He designed and built three ships that revolutionised naval engineering.
WHITWORTH
The history behind the house name:
Sir Joseph Whitworth, 1st Baronet (21 December 1803 – 22 January 1887) was an English engineer, entrepreneur, inventor and philanthropist. In 1841, he devised the British Standard Whitworth system, which created an accepted standard for screw threads. Whitworth also created the Whitworth rifle, often called the ‘sharpshooter’ because of its accuracy and considered one of the earliest examples of a sniper rifle.
At his death in 1887, he bequeathed much of his fortune for the people of Manchester, with the Whitworth Art Gallery and Christie Hospital partly funded by Whitworth’s money. Whitworth Street and Whitworth Hall in Manchester are named in his honour. Whitworth was created a baronet on 7 October 1869.
RUTHERFORD
The history behind the house name:
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand-born British physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopedia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791 – 1867).
In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation. This work was done at McGill University in Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 “for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances”.
Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of Manchester) in the UK, where he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium nuclei. Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate. In 1911, although he could not prove that it was positive or negative, he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering in his gold foil experiment. He is widely credited with first “splitting the atom” in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton.
Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1919. Under his leadership the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932 and in the same year the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton. After his death in 1937, he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. The chemical element rutherfordium (element 104) was named after him in 1997.
VARDIL
The history behind the house name:
Vardil was a maths teacher at Mulberry Stepney Green Maths, Computing & Science College. He was a war hero, a senior teacher and head of the Yellow House.
He was a smart, helpful and funny man who was a great teacher and looked after and mentored new teachers. In his honour they named the Yellow House after him. He has been the only teacher at Mulberry Stepney Green Maths, Computing and Science College to have a House named after him.
The house system is currently under review
