Queen Ethelburga's Collegiate is an independent boarding and day school for girls and boys from 3 months to 19 years old, located in Thorpe Underwood, near Little Ouseburn, northwest of York, England. It is a member of the Independent Schools Association. It is named after Æthelburh of Kent. The school is administered under The Collegiate Foundation, which oversees the school as two separate entities. The first, Queen Ethelburga's College, comprises three sections: the Chapter House preparatory school, King's Magna middle school, and a GCSE and Sixth Form section. The second is The Faculty of Queen Ethelburga's and is purely GCSE and Sixth Form. Notably, the academic performance of the College and the Faculty differ.
In 1991 Queen Ethelburga's School left the Woodward Corporation, became independent and came to exist in the trust arrangement, renamed Queen Ethelburga's College. At this time, at the behest of the new owner Brian Martin, it moved from Harrogate to the present campus at Thorpe Underwood, the Martin family home, and a huge investment programme was commenced fuelled by the family's business fortune, being the owners and proprietors of E&L Insurance Group. The senior school has been co-educational since 1999 and draws pupils from over 30 countries. Pupil numbers of Queen Ethelburga's Collegiate rose from a total of 550 in 2007 to 1,590 in 2015. In the same period a large £80m investment had been made in a new sports village, new boarding houses and new classrooms, and other facilities. In 2016, pupils raised £5,500 over the span of a week for the Chinese earthquake appeal. The E&L group of insurance companies is based on the school site, owned and managed by the Martin family who feature prominently on the school governing board.
Rankings
Queen Ethelburga's College was ranked 10th by the Daily Telegraph, for A*/A A-Level Results, in their 2015 UK Independent School League Tables. The Faculty of Queen Ethelburga's was ranked 11th in the same League Table. In the Daily Telegraph 2013 Top 100 Secondary Schools in the UK, including all State and all Independent Schools, Queen Ethelburga's College was ranked 44th. The Faculty of Queen Ethelburga's did not make it to the Top 100. The 2016 pass rate at Queen Ethelburga's College was 100%, with 98% of its A-Level grades A* to B. The Faculty of Queen Ethelburga's on the other hand had achieved 91% Distinction or Distinction Star grades in all BTEC subjects, the two highest possible grade classifications. The school ranks as the most expensive mainstream boarding school in England.
Sports
Queen Ethelburga's rugby union first team secured the 2015 British Colleges National Cup. Yorkshire County Cricket Club has agreed a partnership with the school. This includes the creation of a joint cricket academy for 16 to 19-year-old players.
Awards
It has been awarded the Healthy School of the Year in the 2016 TES Awards, as well as the Independent Schools Association Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sport 2015 and the Outstanding Progress Award at an Independent School at the Education Business Awards.
Controversies
School worker injury
In 2002 Care & Recreation Holdings, the company servicing the schools' campus grounds, was fined for failing to ensure employee safety after a worker fell two storeys from a temporary boardwalk while stacking mattresses and bed frames in the school dormitory block, suffering minor injuries.
Planning contravention and apology
In 2008 the school's then senior trustee Brian Martin had to apologize to the local community after Harrogate Borough Council had issued a planning contravention notice to the school owners and further suspected the school of 16 breaches of planning controls. The School had submitted retrospective planning applications for the new buildings and those that were in progress. A number of school estates staff were fired some months after the building works were halted. This came after Brian Martin was fined £6,000 in 2001 for breaching planning law when altering a Grade II listed building on the school grounds. These works on the listed building had many retrospective planning applications lodged, which worsened the degree of culpability in that case according to the council.
In 2015 the school was given notice to improve after an inspection by the Independent Schools Inspectorate, conducted at the request of the Department of Education, uncovered a large CCTV network on the school site. The CCTV network counted 700 cameras at the time of inspection.
Chair of governors indecent assault crimes
In November 2015 North Yorkshire Police reported that former chair of governors Brian Martin, 66, had been arrested on 20 October in Harrogate on suspicion of indecent assault on a child and on conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and voyeurism. Martin was replaced by his daughter, Amy Martin, as the Chair of The Collegiate Board. He was later charged with 10 counts of indecent assault, three counts of attempted buggery and one count each of possessing indecent images and buggery. All charges related to two children between 1982 and 1995. He was due to stand trial at Leeds Crown Court on 10 July 2017. In January 2018 Martin appeared at Harrogate Magistrates Court on further charges which were alleged to have taken place between 2005 and 2010. He pleaded not guilty to seven sexual offences against children, allegedly committed at Queen Ethelburga's College, include inciting a boy aged 14 or 15 to engage in sexual activity. Martin was given unconditional bail and the prosecution told the court that he would face trial for these, and other linked offences, at Leeds Crown Court on 29 May 2018. As of 10 July 2018, Martin was still facing three charges, all against pupils at the college: two of indecently assaulting a girl and one of sexually assaulting a boy, on all of which the jury had been unable to reach verdicts.
Money laundering
In May 2016 The Guardian reported that, in March 2012, $20,792 was sent via Lloyds Bank in Harrogate to Queen Ethelburga's Collegiate. This was said to be money laundered from the Russian Hermitage Capital Management fraud. In September 2017 The Guardian reported that £89,800 was transferred to Queen Ethelburga's Collegiate. The money was reportedly connected to the Azerbaijani Laundromat scandal, in which the Azerbaijani government is supposedly involved.
Teacher ban after relationship with Sixth Form pupil
In 2017 a teacher misconduct panel banned Howard Britton from teaching for life due to a sexual relationship with a pupil that developed in early 2005 when Britton taught Economics at the school.
In August 2018, the Charity Commission had begun an investigation into two charities linked to the Queen Ethelburga's College and Queen Ethelburga's Faculty schools based on the same site. The charities are The Collegiate Charitable Foundation and The Martin Foundation. The primary activity of these charities is to "...provide bursaries to enable students to attend independent primary and secondary schools; provide advertising, facilities and equipment for the schools, and assist the local community". The Commission had established that there are serious regulatory issues present, including trustee conflicts of interest, improper charity asset accounting, unauthorized benefit of the trustees and questions over whether the charities operated exclusively for charitable purposes. The issues are serious enough that the Commission has taken over the management of the two charities. The Collegiate Charitable Foundation receives rent from both the Faculty and the College schools on the site, and the chair of governors of the schools Amy Martin is the chair of both charities, her having replaced her father Brian Martin as the chair of governors of the schools in 2015. The contact details for both charities go direct to the website of the College.
