Kings College replaced a previous school on the same site and was the first privately managed state school in the UK, operating through a ten-year partnership between a not-for-profit company, 3Es Enterprises and Surrey County Council. This article examines the experience of this privatisation through the perspectives of students who had attended both the new college and the school from which it emerged. It examines the background to the new college and some of the key concepts in the literature regarding privatisation, school culture and student perceptions. It then reports on questionnaires and interviews carried out with Year 10 and 11 students. It concludes that there are significant factors, which, from the students' perspectives, appear to have brought about improvement, particularly a change of culture and learning-focused leadership. Further investigation is needed in this school and in others that have been involved in various transformational programmes, in order to identify causal links between processes and outcomes.