Wanganui Collegiate School has grown from a simple country home, where a handful of students lived with the Headmaster in the 1850s, to today's 25 hectares and a magnificent array of buildings. Yet through all of the changes of size and site, the theme of boarding and living together with caring academic staff remains the same.

The earliest New Zealand Governor granted land to the Anglican Church to found a school in the tiny settlement of Wanganui to serve its pioneering community. Through economic good times and bad, through wars and peace, the School continued to grow.

From the original site now close to the city centre, the School moved to Victoria Avenue. The gabled, timbered buildings, filled by successful Headmasters, accommodated an expanding roll through the 19th Century, and boarders came from throughout the country.

In the first decade of the 20th Century, the Trustees took a huge step. Certain of the School's strength, they moved to the outermost edge of the land endowment (now well within the modern city's limits) and built the core of the School as it is today. Sandhills were levelled, lagoons drained and trees planted. Much of the work was undertaken by the students. In 1911 the new School opened with three Houses, a classroom building ('Big School'), a dining hall and the Headmaster's residence. Funds for a new Chapel were raised during the first Easter Weekend on the new site.

The School has continued to grow, with the day student increase balancing the traditionally strong national and international boarding base. Co-education in the 1990s completed its modern shape.

Wanganui Collegiate School is an institution which traces its roots to the earliest beginnings of the community of which it is an integral part. Its past provides a proud and firm foundation from which to look forward into the 21st Century.