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Collingham GCSE and Sixth Form College
Day
Boys & Girls
Senior, Sixth
Collingham is a home for independent minds.
For fifty years, Collingham has looked at every student as an individual. We flex to fit their needs rather than asking them to fit ours, so they can be themselves and do their best work.
Founded in 1975 by John Marsden and Nick Browne, the college is still owned by their families. Our 180 or so students are aged 13 to 19 and come from a wide range of backgrounds.
No class has more than nine students, and lessons run like university seminars. Students who have always had more to say than the classroom allowed come into their own here. Our specialist teachers include examiners and practising artists and writers. Every student has a personal tutor who knows them well enough to push them and notice when something is wrong.
More than 40 subjects leave room to find what you enjoy. Year 12s start with four and drop one later, so they can try something new before they commit. The aim is a love of learning that outlasts exams. Year 14 offers retakes or a new A level in one year. Our Easter revision courses are open to all.
There is no uniform and everyone uses first names. The Good Schools Guide called us “totally non-judgemental”, and in January 2026 the Independent Schools Inspectorate found every standard met. We help leavers go wherever they will thrive. In 2026 that meant Oxford, UCL, King’s College London, Edinburgh and Bristol, dental surgery at Sheffield, art and architecture at UAL and Arts University Bournemouth, and universities in the US and Switzerland.
The sixth form, for Years 12 to 14, is in an Arts and Crafts townhouse on Collingham Gardens, a short walk from the South Kensington museums and Imperial College. The building has been used for teaching for more than a century, and as Gibbs’ Preparatory School it once taught Christopher Robin Milne. GCSE students in Years 9 to 11 are at 16 Young Street, off Kensington Square, in the house where William Makepeace Thackeray wrote Vanity Fair.
To mark our fiftieth year we chose Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros woodcut as a symbol of the independence of mind, curiosity and creativity that drive us. Dürer had never seen a rhino, but he brought his skill to what he knew and trusted his imagination with the rest. That is the confidence we want every student to leave with, and it lives on in our ethos: Be Yourself, Master Your Subject, Think Independently. We’d love to tell you more.