The school was founded in 1931. It stands in sixty acres of fields and woodland within an area of outstanding natural beauty on the edge of Ashdown forest facing south to the Downs. The buildings consist of an old manor house and its home farm adapted and restored to a high standard.
We have excellent facilities for a wide variety of sports, with tennis courts, an outdoor heated swimming pool and a sports hall. Each child chooses from a wide variety of hobbies, arts, crafts, games or activities in winter evenings. Computers are integrated into the curriculum in many subjects. Prizes in national competitions are consistently won for painting, ceramics, handwriting and poetry.
The school has a fine reputation for high academic standards, music and drama. Each year about sixty children are involved in the annual Elizabethan play, which is performed in our open-air theatre at the end of the Summer Term. Operettas and smaller-scale plays are produced at other times, and our Chorus performs in a large public choral concert with professional soloists in March every year. The Barn Theatre, built with the oak timbers of an old Sussex barn in 1980, serves the school as well as the local community as an Arts Centre. Many actors, musicians and lecturers perform in the Barn Theatre and the children are taken to plays, concerts, operas, ballets and museums and galleries during the school year. We also take parties on various camping, bicycling and skiing trips, for orchestral weeks in Holland, Italy and France, historical visits to sites, and sporting tours of England and South Africa.
