Seaford College

Seaford College was founded in 1884 in the coastal Sussex town of Seaford as a small boys' boarding school, taking its name from the seaside location of the original campus. The school was evacuated during the Second World War and in 1946 relocated permanently to Lavington Park, a 450-acre West Sussex estate at the foot of the South Downs near Petworth, where it has operated ever since. The school retained the name Seaford College after the move. Seaford remained a boys' school for over a century and became fully co-educational only in the 1990s. Today it educates around 962 pupils ages 7-18 with a substantial boarding population. The Headmaster is John Green.

The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association and is inspected by the ISI. The 450-acre Lavington Park campus is set within the South Downs National Park and is one of only a small number of UK schools to maintain an on-campus championship 18-hole golf course (the others being Stowe and Whitgift), which has produced a notable golf academy and a particularly strong sporting profile.

The school's academic profile is mid-tier independent — solid A-Level results consistent with mainstream HMC boarding schools — but its co-curricular and sporting profile is genuinely distinctive. The combination of the 450-acre estate, the championship golf course, the proximity to the south coast and the South Downs riding country produces a strong outdoor, sporting and military-services pipeline. The astronomer and broadcaster Sir Patrick Moore CBE — presenter of the BBC's The Sky at Night from 1957 to 2012, the longest-running television presenting career in history — was educated partly at Seaford.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme intended to provide access for Sussex and Hampshire families regardless of family means.