Thomas Bennett Community College (TBCC) is a maintained comprehensive secondary school for pupils aged 11 to 18. It caters to approximately 1400 pupils in Years 7 to 13, including nearly 200 in its sixth form. It now specialises as a sports college. The school was planned as part of the development of Crawley as a new town in the late 1940s. Originally it had been intended to open a grammar school and two secondary modern schools on the Tilgate campus, although by the time the school was built, this plan changed to provide a bilateral secondary school for boys and girls for a trial period of two years. This entitled the school to run separate grammar and secondary modern departments as part of one school. The school was named after the chairman of the development corporation which had overseen the development of the New Town, Sir Thomas Bennett. Bennett officially opened the school in 1959 (the first pupils having joined the school in 1958). Although originally intended as a bilateral school, the staff of the school organised classes along comprehensive lines, with students work in sets depending on their ability in subjects, rather than broad streams.