The Quincentenary

2032 will see Collyer’s celebrate its 500 year anniversary. Founded by Richard Collyer during the reign of King Henry VIII, Collyer’s has grown from a school with just one classroom to a vibrant and modern campus college offering an outstanding education to more than 2,000 students a year from across the region. Our ability to continually develop and innovate for the local community has resulted in an enviable heritage and reputation.

The Quincentenary Fund

With our vision of being “proud of our past and ambitious for our future” at the heart of everything we do, we are using our Quincentenary as a milestone to further develop our estate, creating a legacy for the next 500 years. Collyer’s has been developing plans for its property since our founder, Richard Collyer, established the original school in Horsham next to St Mary’s Church in The Causeway. Now, still sitting proudly at the heart of the town, it is time to expand our campus in a way that is fit for the future, adds vital facilities and makes our community proud.

Donations and fundraising to achieve much needed estate expansion are becoming vital as central government real-time funding decreases and capital funding has become increasingly competitive and complicated.

So this year we are launching The Quincentenary Fund, a giving fund enabling our communities to come together to help us achieve the biggest campus expansion Collyer’s has seen in a generation, a project we are calling The Masterplan

By celebrating our heritage we can build something today that will guarantee Collyer’s, and most importantly its students, a bright future for the next 500 years and beyond.

The Masterplan

The Quincentenary Fund is single minded in its objective to support the financing of The Masterplan, an ambitious campus expansion to be delivered by 2032. In addition to the overall redevelopment of open spaces, the focus of the project will be delivering:

• A larger Sports Centre
• A cutting edge Tech Centre
• An impressive Library Expansion
• A modernised Arts Quarter

We invite you to click here and explore The Masterplan further, with details and images that truly bring our vision to life and help you share in our excitement.

Target

The total cost of the project will be met through a combination of grants and other sources of funding. However, our ambitious nature means we want to strive for a development project that exceeds expectations and the budget that can be raised through these channels.

This has led to the launch of The Quincentenary Fund, with an aim of raising £5 million by our 500th anniversary.

Our plans go further than just keeping pace with a growing local community. By giving to The Quincentenary Fund you will be gifting the students of Collyer’s a level and experience of further education that continues to go above and beyond expectations of state funded schooling. At the same time you would be supporting the future of one of the leading sixth form colleges in the country, setting the course for the next 500 years of service to Horsham and the surrounding areas.

The fund has been given an incredible start of £500,000, this is the remainder of an extremely generous legacy donation from one of our Old Collyerians’, John Snelling. Already funding our brand new Café that opened in 2022, the decision to gift to Collyer’s in his Will continues to give and demonstrates to us what can be achieved when our community pulls together.

Timeline

The delivery of the different development projects will be staggered across the next 9 years. Our aim is to open the Sports Centre in 2026, followed by the Tech Centre, Library Expansion and finally the Arts Quarter over subsequent years.

The overall goal is to have the whole project complete by 2032, the perfect way to celebrate our Quincentenary.

Donate

Every single penny donated to The Quincentenary Fund is appreciated and we want everyone who is keen to be able to find an appropriate level to give at. We therefore have a variety of options available; whether it’s one-off, something on a regular basis or a legacy donation you are considering.

Click here for more information on all the different ways you can donate.