Phase 2: The Grange
The Grange is our much loved old boarding house which was bought by the school in 1950 and provided a happy home for boarders for 70 years until the sad closure of boarding during the pandemic. Since then, the Grange has been used as the base for our Sixth Form. However, we haven’t been able to take advantage of the building’s full potential due to a lack of funding needed to transform it into a bespoke Sixth Form centre.
How the building will change
The Manwood's Future Fund will commit £1.5m of its funds to the project which will deliver the main changes necessary to create a new Sixth Form centre, and the floor plans show the substantial changes that will be made to the building:
- Structural work needed to create new sixth form social and study spaces on the ground floor and a new roof on the orangery to make it usable throughout the year.
- Removing walls on the 1st floor to turn dormitories and staff flats into 5 new classrooms primarily for A level subjects like Economics and Psychology.
- New office space for those departments on the 2nd floor.
- New IT infrastructure throughout the building.
- The new boys and girls toilets needed now that this is a mixed gender building.
Our Fundraising Plans for 2024
Even with a budget of £1.5m we will not be able to afford all the changes that we want to make to The Grange, so we will hold a year of fundraising events, sponsorship & grant applications to raise the £0.5m we need to make The Grange truly fantastic:
- Building on our environmental work elsewhere in the school, we want to take this once in a generation opportunity to install a substatiale heating system to replace the current gas boiler (at a cost of £300,000).
- Kitting out each of the classrooms and Sixth Form spaces with new furniture and IT to match the newly decorated rooms (at a cost of £150,000).
- Ensuring that we maintain and enhance the original features of the building that boarders will remember, such as the beautiful wooden doors, cornices and staircases (at a cost of £50,000)