Lancing College

Lancing College was founded in 1848 by the Reverend Nathaniel Woodard as the founding school of the Woodard Corporation — Woodard's Anglican school federation that today operates around 40 Anglican schools across the United Kingdom. The school sits on a dramatic hillside campus above the Sussex coast at Lancing, with sweeping views of the South Downs and the English Channel. The school's principal architectural feature is the Lancing Chapel — built between 1868 and 1978 over more than a century in High Victorian Gothic style and one of the largest single-room Gothic spaces in any English school. The chapel is widely regarded as the largest school chapel in the world.

Lancing became co-educational in the 1970s and today educates around 612 pupils with a substantial boarding population. The Head Master is Dominic Oliver. The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association.

The school's most internationally famous alumnus is the novelist Evelyn Waugh — author of Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, Scoop, Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy, widely regarded as among the greatest English-language satirists of the twentieth century. Waugh attended Lancing from 1917 to 1921 and his autobiography A Little Learning (1964) recorded his unhappy schooldays. The playwright David Hare CBE — Plenty, The Permanent Way, Skylight, the National Theatre's adaptation of The History Boys — was a Lancing boy. The lyricist Sir Tim Rice — Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita (his work with Andrew Lloyd Webber), and the music for Disney's The Lion King — was at Lancing. The screenwriter Sir Christopher Hampton CBE — Oscar-winning screenwriter of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Atonement and The Father — was at Lancing. The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton — author of The Meaning of Conservatism and the principal British conservative philosopher of the late twentieth century — was at Lancing. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Woodard Foundation.