By Geoffrey Stanford, Headmaster, RGS Newcastle
As the Royal Grammar School (RGS) Newcastle celebrates its quincentenary, not only have our academic results been recognised in the top one per cent of schools nationally for value added relative to cohorts of equivalent ability (including our SEND students) but our latest inspection report also recognises our approach to inclusion as a “significant strength.”
For 500 years, RGS Newcastle has welcomed young people from all backgrounds, nurturing generations of learners who go on to make their mark on the world.
From Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood to Nobel Laureate Sir Gregory Winter, our legacy is one of excellence, opportunity, and impact. However, our story is about more than our achievements – it is our ethos and values that are at the heart of everything we do:
A Sense of Belonging – Rooted in our history and place in the city, we are building a future fuelled by ambition and a deep connection to our community.
Love for Learning – We are a vibrant, inclusive environment where curiosity thrives and ideas flourish.
Belief in Each Other – We care deeply, support one another, and act with integrity, within and beyond the school gates.
Ambition to Succeed – We challenge, inspire and empower every individual to explore, dream, and be their truest self.
As we envision the next 500 years and the journey ahead, we have prepared a strategic document that seeks to articulate how we intend to progress and evolve. Our forward-looking strategy was deliberately published on 1/5/25 to reflect the date of Thomas Horsley’s will back in 1525, within which he pledged his estate to fund a grammar school. It is a statement of purpose, shaped by conversations across our whole school community, and a call to work together to build a bold and inclusive future for RGS and the wider North East.
Indeed, while RGS is an independent day school we are also a charity that exists for the advancement of education of children and young persons across the region. Therefore, while we promote excellence, we are also strongly committed to improving opportunities, raising aspirations and attainment across the region. We believe in inspiring young people and equipping them to make a positive contribution to society.
All RGS students – in our Junior School through to our Sixth Formers – benefit from this sense of purpose but we are particularly proud of the impact that we are able to have through our bursary programme. In turn, our very talented bursary students substantially add to the experience of every child at the school. We are extremely grateful to the philanthropy that has allowed us to increase our transformational bursary holders from 90 in 2024/5 to 100 from September 2025. In doing so we will have supported over 500 students since the inception of our Bursary Campaign just over twenty years ago. In parallel, we seek to have a positive impact more broadly across the region, with more than 70 projects now running in over 100 state schools. This work is made possible by the generosity of funding partners who support a team of partnership teachers, which continues to grow year on year. So far, our team of partnership teachers supports students across Maths, Physics, Robotics and Computer Science. This is an ever-evolving programme as we recently welcomed a new Rugby Partnerships Coach to work across our partner schools thanks to funding from the Rugby Football Union (RFU).
Our Partnership programme has already received national recognition, and we have always believed that this work is scalable. It is therefore very exciting for the RGS to be taking the operational lead on a nationwide STEM Horizons project, funded by the Hg Foundation. In the first instance this project will be placing Computer Science teachers in five cities across the UK, each working across five partner schools for the next three years. This project is accompanied by robust external impact measurement with a view to rolling it out more widely. Who knows what we can achieve over the next 500 years!
www.rgs.newcastle.sch.uk/500th