Access All Areas: fundraising priorities

We encourage gifts to be unrestricted, allowing Queen’s the flexibility to support those areas most in need.

This ensures we can address critical priorities, respond to unexpected challenges and seize emerging opportunities such as increasing student support, developing access initiatives in the North West, Lewisham and Sutton, and securing key academic teaching posts.

Ultimately, The Queen’s Fund is dedicated to enhancing the student experience at College by suplementing and enhancing access and outreach work, the tutorial fellowships and our student support provisions.

This year’s Telethon, running between 6th January – 19th January 2025 seeks to raise support from Old Members at all levels to support the Queen’s Fund.

Take a look at our brilliant 2025 Telethon Calling team by reading their profiles, here. 

You can make your gift to The Queen’s Fund by following the links at the bottom of this page!

The Queen’s College and The Access Project Partnership 

Queen’s was founded to enable bright young students from modest backgrounds to experience a first class education and this commitment has continued through the centuries.

Since 2022 the College has been working with The Access Project to deliver a bold new outreach initiative to enhance its Access and Outreach work.

This partnership brings a strategic, evidenced-based, and sustained solution to widening access and participation in Higher Education. Initially the partnership was for three years, ending in the summer of 2025, working with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in the North West. Our current partner schools are: Workington Academy, The Whitehaven Academy and Darwen Vale High School.

You can read more about this partnership, here.

We were delighted that these initial three years were supported by the donations from a small group of Old Members. The Governing Body has now agreed to extend this partnership for another three years, starting from the academic year 2025/26.

In total, Queen’s is looking to secure £160,000 per year for the next three years to support this programme across four schools working with around 40 students enrolled in each school;

• Darwen Vale High School
• Workington Academy
• The Whitehaven Academy
• D6 (a new Sixth Form recently opened in Blackburn with Darwen)

Volunteering with The Access Project Partnership

Old Members can also support the partnership by volunteering as a tutor.

To learn more about becoming a volunteer, please take a look at the presentation about volunteering, which is available on our School’s Outreach pages. You can also watch a recording of an online Volunteering event on our Youtube channel.

If you are ready to apply to become a volunteer for our schools in the northwest, please visit The Access Project’s website for further details.

If you have any additional questions before signing up please feel free to contact the TAP team.

Access and Outreach: core work by our  Schools Liaison and Outreach Officer 

Today we continue our commitment to identifying, encouraging applications from and offering places to prospective students solely on the basis of their academic excellence and potential to benefit from the opportunities provided by the College. We recognise that some groups of students will require different types of support and that teachers, advisors and parents play an important part in encouraging and supporting students to apply to Oxford.

Take a look at the Schools Outreach section of this website and you will see the great work being done by School’s Liaison and Outreach Officer and the team of current students.

Help us protect the College’s capacity to seek out and inspire those who most benefit from an Oxford education: help support the School’s Liaison Officer post and meet the costs involved in connecting with link schools in the North West and South London.

A gift of £50 per month could cover the transport, accommodation and living costs of one sixth former on our four day Spring Schools’ Residential.

It costs over £11,000 to fund a science ‘taster’ week for 25 pupils, during which time they live at Queen’s and experience tutorials and working in both labs and libraries.

Oxford has some unique pressures, but financial instability should not be one of them.  

Gifts to the Student Support Fund helps Queen’s ensure that the brightest students are able to study at Queen’s, free from financial worry. Queen’s is able to help our students with book awards, travel grants for undergraduate and postgraduates and hardship support for those in need. 

There is also a long-distance grant for students with home fee status located 125 miles or more from the College 

Over the last year, the College has helped students to replace broken laptops and to meet unexpected costs for things like emergency travel home and replacement accommodation. Queen’s also provided additional student support grants (for books, academic travel, long-distance travel home, and academic support to name but a few areas) of around £120,000.  

We also support our Graduate Community

Help build our Graduate Scholarship funds to attract the brightest and best to come to Queen’s.

We compete internationally for the best graduate students and cultivate the research of top academics.

We currently offer a range of scholarships with a large number of our graduate students receiving direct financial support from College (this includes partial and matched fully funded scholarships), but more can always be done to support our graduate students.

One of the priority Graduate Scholarships we are keen to endow is The Tony Honoré Scholarship in Law, for a student on the BCL or MJur course.

Please do get in touch with as at development@queens.ox.ac.uk if you’d like to find out more about making a gift to support out Graduate Scholarships.

Ensuring key teaching posts are retained by the College is one of Queen’s’ ongoing priorities and this has been generously supported by Old Members over the years.

A number of Fellowships have already been endowed, including both of those in Chemistry, as well as Fellowships in Medicine, Physics and more recently The Roger Pearson Fellowship in French and the Brittenden Fellowship in History. We are hugely grateful to all those who have enabled the College to commit to these subjects in perpetuity.

The Peter Neumann Fellowship in Mathematics

The Queen’s College has a long teaching tradition in Mathematics. There are two-full time Mathematics Fellows, neither of which are endowed.

In December 2020, the College was saddened to learn of the death of Dr Peter Neumann OBE, Old Member (Maths, 1959) and Emeritus Fellow of The Queen’s College.   In celebration of the life and work of Dr Neumann and his contribution to College, Queen’s now seeks to raise support and funds to endow this Mathematic Fellowship.

The cost to endow this post at Queen’s is £2.5 million, with nearly £700,000 raised in gifts and pledges to date. Following the formal launch of this fund at the Subject Dinner for Mathematicians (June, 2022), we hope that that many more Maths Old Members, and those who knew Peter in one of his other College Officerships, will support this fund and help us secure this important Fellowship in perpetuity. You can read more about the Mathematics Fundraising appeal, here. 

If you are interested in supporting tutorial teaching in other subjects for the next generations of Queen’s students, we would be very pleased to talk to you. Please contact development@queens.ox.ac.uk.