Sir John Lawes School (also known as SJL) is a mixed state secondary school with academy status in Harpenden, United Kingdom. The school has close links to two other local secondary schools, Roundwood Park School and St George's School, and to the neighbouring Manland Primary School, and is active in the community and abroad. History Thanks to the effort of, and largely at the expense of, John Bennett Lawes, founder of Rothamsted Research, work was begun to start educating Harpenden's youth in 1847. The "British School" was founded on Leyton road (now park hall) in 1850. The school soon began to outgrow this site. In 1894 the people of Harpenden elected a school board to manage the British School, now overcrowded and run-down. A site for a new school was bought for £725 on the corner of the newly built Victoria and Vaughan Roads. The building was completed in 1896 and opened on 12 January 1897, with room for 140 boys at the northern end, 120 girls at the southern end and 140 infants in the centre. In 1919, the Boys', Girls' and Infants' departments at Victoria Road School were reorganised into Senior Mixed School and Junior Mixed School. A campaign began for a new school and Hertfordshire County Council purchased land on Manland Common. Several new designs were considered for providing new senior and junior schools on the Manland sites. In 1938, the building of the new schools began. Building was completed in the summer of 1939, but by September, when the schools were to open, the Second World War had been declared—the buildings' design, with reinforced basements and thick solid brick walls, reflects the public's wariness of the looming conflict. Arthur Watts took up duties as Headmaster of Manland Common Senior Elementary School, but the opening had to be delayed for a week until 21 September 1939 to arrange for accommodation of evacuees. When the new term began without ceremony, the Manland School senior pupils had to share the buildings with evacuees from the Hugh Myddleton School, London. In 1982, the name of the school was changed from "Manland Secondary School" to "Sir John Lawes School" in honour of its founder. House system The school is split into seven houses, Austen (Red), Britten (Yellow), Hepworth, (Green), King (Silver), Lawes (Orange), Newton (Blue) and Ryder (Purple), named for Jane Austen, Benjamin Britten, Barbara Hepworth, Martin Luther King Jr., John