Eastbourne College

Eastbourne College was founded in 1867 by the Duke of Devonshire as part of his Eastbourne Estate development — at a time when Eastbourne was being constructed as a planned Victorian seaside resort on the Sussex Downs. The school sits today on a coastal campus on the Eastbourne seafront with views across the English Channel. Eastbourne became co-educational in 1996 and today educates around 622 pupils with a substantial boarding population. The Head Master is Tom Lawson. The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association.

The school's most internationally significant alumnus is Sir Frederick Soddy — winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery (with Ernest Rutherford at McGill University) of radioactive isotopes. Soddy's work on the chemistry of radioactive substances established the theoretical framework for the modern understanding of nuclear chemistry and atomic structure. Soddy's later economic writings (Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt, 1926) made him among the founding figures of ecological economics. He attended Eastbourne College in the 1880s. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Eastbourne College Foundation.