All change: Trinity School will start taking girl pupils in Year 6 and 7 from September 2027
Less than a year after announcing the £30,000 a year fee-paying school would start offering places to girls, plans have gone in for works that will see its expansion to 1,400 pupils.
By STEVEN DOWNES
Plans for a £40million extension to Trinity School in Shirley have been submitted.
The first major re-build since the school moved to the site is intended to adapt and upgrade the fee-paying school to be fully co-educational by 2031.
Trinity, part of the Whitgift Foundation, announced its co-ed plans less than a year ago, with the first cohort of 10- and 11-year-old girls expected to be admitted from September 2027. Trinity has admitted girls to its Sixth Form since 2011. Currently, a year’s fees to attend the school come in at £30,000 per pupil.
Trinity is one of the two large independent schools run by the Whitgift Foundation. The move to make Trinity co-ed was a reaction by the charity, the biggest landowners in Croydon, to their earlier decision to close their only girls’ school, the 900-pupil Old Palace, based in Old Town and South Croydon, which finally ended more than 130 years of educating young women in Croydon last July.
The decision to adapt Trinity to cater for children of both genders was taken mostly because it had already made changes for its Sixth Form. But the leap from the current 1,000 pupils to closer to 1,400 will require considerable expansion of the buildings within the 27-acre Shirley Park site.
The planning application was lodged with Croydon Council last week, and is now available for public inspection here.
The planning app states: “Phased development comprising the demolition of four dwellings (Class C3) used as staff accommodation and maintenance store. Erection of a three-storey Sixth Form building with associated facilities linked to a new three-storey building with fitness suite and classrooms (Class F1). Formation of canopy linking new buildings with existing school. Erection of grounds shed and plant structures. Formation of associated car parking areas, creation of new hard and soft landscaping areas, retention of existing access/egress points and other associated external works.”
One of the less obvious changes from the extensive planning application documents will be a revision of the access to the school from Addiscombe Road, with the intention of reducing, if not eliminating, the potentially hazardous daily crush on the pavements as hundreds of boys (it is still mostly a boys’ school) wait for their buses home.
Major works: the redevelopment of Trinity School includes (2) reconfigured parking by the school’s main entrance; (4) New fitness suite; (5) New classroom block with 10 classrooms; (6) New Sixth Form block; (8) Cottages and garage demolition; and (16) dining hall refurbishment and extension
Some preliminary consultations have been held with residents and parents. “Trinity now welcomes further views and comments on the plans,” a spokesperson for the school said today.
“Submitting this planning application marks an important step in the next chapter of Trinity’s development, both for the school and the wider community,” said Alasdair Kennedy, Trinity’s headmaster.
“As we prepare to become fully co-educational, our focus is on creating high-quality learning environments…
“The proposed facilities are designed to be inclusive, flexible and shared, supporting a broad range of learning, wellbeing and enrichment opportunities. We welcome views from local residents and interested parties as we shape the future of the school together.”
Trinity and the Whitgift Foundation have gone to some lengths to stress that the project is not to be paid for by parents.
As first revealed by Inside Croydon, in 2022 the Foundation had taken out a £70million loan facility to enable it to build a girls’ school on Melville Avenue, plans that were abandoned with the decision to close Old Palace. The Foundation has in the past year also sold property from Old Palace and raised more than £12million.
Building for a future: a new Sixth Form block, converted dining hall and new sports facilities are in Trinity’s plans
Some works are already underway to adapt Trinity for its co-ed future. Over the past year the school has opened a new gym, as well as a hockey astro pitch and changing facilities.
Works are to begin next month on the school dining room, which will also function as a lecture and performance space. A residential property at 208 Addiscombe Road is to be converted into flats.
“The main works included in the planning application will be carefully phased to avoid disruption to teaching and learning,” the school says.
What is now known as Trinity had previously occupied a site in Croydon town centre, in a grandly Gothic Victorian building surrounded by sports fields. These were bulldozed in the 1960s to make way for the Whitgift Shopping Centre. It has been the stalled £1billion redevelopment of the shopping mall and its associated office blocks which has caused the financial squeeze on the Whitgift Foundation which led to the closure of the Old Palace girls’ school.
“This year marks 60 years since Trinity relocated to its 27-acre Shirley Park site, a move that began an exciting period of growth,” the school said in unveiling its plans today.
“Since 1965, state-of-the-art facilities have been added over time, and the decision to welcome girls into the Sixth Form in 2011 represented a further step towards the vision of a fully co-educational school by 2031.”
Read more: Trinity boys’ school confirms that it will go co-ed from 2027
Read more: Old Palace closure brought on by shaky Foundation finances
Read more: Falling rolls and rising fees: how Old Palace got squeezed
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So they say cannot afford to pay for The Old Palace school for Girls, but can find £40m to extend a Boys school!
You say “less than a year” for them to submit a planning application to be able to give girls an education. The other way to look at this is it’s taken nearly a year for the Whitgift Foundation to get round to this, more if you take into account the fact that they knew Old Palace was going to be closed. Meanwhile, girls at Old Palace have been left to fend for themselves. Trinity could quite easily have put up temporary classrooms and toilet blocks on its vast estate, and taken in the girls without a break. Why didn’t they?
That’s not the case, Arf. Old Palace girls have not been left to “fend for themselves”. Many, if not all, were found places at other schools, and received funding in order to do so.
The closure of Old Palace was terribly badly managed, and it represented a knee-jerk response to the on-going financial stresses being inflicted on the Foundation by Westfield, which remain unresolved.
But Old Palace had encountered several years of falling rolls.
Private schools are a business. There is little real sentiment, however much the Foundation might try to stress how it is handing out burseries to some fortunate children and their families.
Now, at Trinity, based on today’s annual school fees (and not allowing for bursery discounts), by 2031 with a full co-ed school of 1,400 pupils, they will be generating £42million per year in fees revenue.
At Old Palace, they were unable to match that.