Independent Minds Since 1975
Collingham is an independent, co-educational GCSE and Sixth Form college in London, built on one idea: students learn best when they are trusted to think for themselves.
For fifty years, that’s meant classes of nine students or fewer, two-hour lessons built around discussion, and teachers who go by first names, in a place with no uniform to hide behind. Our community consists of around 150 students aged 13 to 19 who join us from a wide range of schools and backgrounds. Some join us for their GCSE years, most arrive at the start of Year 12, and others come to us for a one-year course in Year 14, either to retake a year or to change course, before moving forward with confidence.
How we teach
Be Yourself. Master Your Subject. Think Independently.
Small classes mean every voice gets heard and nowhere to hide. Discussion-based teaching means students test ideas out loud, defend them, and sometimes change their minds. Mastery comes from working a subject through for yourself, supported at every step by staff who know you well and remain uncompromising on academic standards, personal integrity and responsibility.
Where we teach
Our GCSE department, for Years 9 to 11, is based in what was once William Makepeace Thackeray’s house, just off Kensington High Street. He wrote Vanity Fair within these walls, with all three Brontë sisters among his regular guests.
Our Sixth Form sits in Collingham Gardens, a short walk from Gloucester Road and Earls Court, in a historic Arts and Crafts townhouse that has belonged to education for over a century, once home to Gibbs’ Preparatory School. Robert Kennedy, Lord Snowdon, Prince Edward, Viscount Linley and Christopher Robin Milne, the inspiration behind Winnie the Pooh, all passed through these doors before us.
Why the rhino?
Why the rhino?To mark our 50th birthday, we adopted a new symbol: a rhinoceros.
In 1515, working only from a sailor’s written account, Albrecht Dürer drew a rhinoceros he had never seen, reasoning out its form through judgement and imagination alone. He got some details wrong, an extra horn, armour-plated skin that isn’t really there, and his version became one of the most reproduced animal images in art history anyway.
That’s the spirit we’ve carried for fifty years: backing your own judgement, thinking a problem through for yourself, and having the confidence to trust your own conclusions, even when they take you somewhere unexpected.
Collingham bridges the best of a small country school with the vibrancy of central London. Come and meet us at an Open Event or book a personal tour, and see what fifty years of independent thinking looks like in practice.
Independent Minds Since 1975.
International education agents and partner organisations can find information about working with Collingham on our Agents page.
