The Leys School, Cambridge

The Leys School Cambridge was founded in 1875 by Methodists as a boys' boarding school in central Cambridge, immediately south of the University of Cambridge. The school sits today on a 50-acre campus on the south side of central Cambridge, providing direct access to the University. The Leys became co-educational in 1984 and today educates around 564 pupils with a substantial boarding population. The Headmaster is Martin Priestley. The school is a member of the HMC, the Boarding Schools Association and the Methodist Schools Association.

The school's most internationally famous alumnus is the novelist James Hilton — author of Lost Horizon (1933, the novel that introduced the concept of Shangri-La to English-language literature) and Goodbye, Mr Chips (1934, the canonical novel of English boarding-school life, allegedly based partly on a Leys schoolmaster). Hilton's Mr Chipping — the gentle, eccentric Latin master whose decades of teaching at "Brookfield" school span the late Victorian, Edwardian, Great War and inter-war years — has become an archetype of the English public-schoolmaster in popular culture. Hilton attended The Leys in the 1910s. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Methodist Independent Schools Trust.