I am delighted to welcome you to the website for Colyton Grammar School. In 1546 our school was established "for the goodly and virtuous education of children forever”. Today, Colyton Grammar School continues to be a non-fee paying, high performing school for academically able boys and girls. Our goal is to create excellence through intellectual curiosity and creativity and to enable our students to thrive as they take their next steps into the world of university and the workplace. Our values and mission have not really altered from those of our Tudor founders in that we want our young men and women to be people of great principle, integrity and character who are equipped to become the future leaders of their community.
The School has a reputation for academic success and the overwhelming majority of our students progress to the most highly selective universities and places of learning in the UK including Oxford, Cambridge and the Royal College of Music. Our success is built on high expectations, hard work and the fact that we are an inclusive school built on meritocracy. We are a school for every academically able child regardless of social-economic background, ethnicity or gender.
Learning is at the heart of our community and through our outstanding teachers and support staff we nurture a hunger for knowledge and understanding in our learners. We are not satisfied with academic excellence alone but expect our students to make a serious contribution to the extra-curricular programme that is on offer at the school; from success on the sporting field to the delight of winning the National Bar Mock Trial competition. We place significant emphasis on developing the knowledge, skills, principles and values our students need in the 21st Century.
As Headteacher of Colyton Grammar School and also as a teacher of History, I believe that it is important to respect the past, to celebrate the present and to influence the future positively. Our curriculum has always been focused on challenge; on developing the whole person while maintaining rigorous academic and traditional values. Expectations are high and our aim is to be the best school in the country.
I am extremely proud and privileged to be the Headteacher of this great school in the heart of the South West. I hope that you find this website informative and we are happy to welcome visitors to the School.
Mr T J Harris BA (Hons) FCCT
Headteacher
In 1546 twenty yeomen and merchants the first Feoffees - bought some land from the Crown ‘for the benefit of Colyton’, and their first act was to endow a Grammar School ‘for the goodly and virtuous education of children in Colyton forever’.
The school’s first home was a room over the porch of the parish church of St Andrew. Later the Feoffees hired a room in the town. In 1612, the school moved to Church House, which had been enlarged by having another story built onto it.
The first Headmaster on record was William Hull, who came to the school in 1603, at a stipend of £5 a year.
In 1927, the school moved to purpose-built premises on its present day site, in the nearby village of Colyford, one mile from its original home in the centre of Colyton.
A short history of the school, called simply ‘Colyton Grammar School’, was written in the 1970s by Gerald Gosling - a former pupil. It was published by the Old Colytonians Association in 1978.
To write a book about a school that has been in existence for over four centuries, has had four homes, known twenty of our monarchs, all our Prime Ministers, has been through countless wars, two of them global, yet throughout the changes down the centuries has continued to send its children out into and around the world the better equipped to face it because of having been there, is no easy task, and could not have have been undertaken lightly.
It has not been so. Colyton Grammar School has done its best for its children. If this child has done his best for the School with this history, it is because of his having been there.
- G. J. Gosling
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