The Newcastle Royal Grammar School is driven by the difference we can make, not only to the trajectory of the lives of students who attend our school, but also to our broader community and wider society.
Founded almost 500 years ago during Henry VIII’s reign, Thomas Horsley, five time mayor of Newcastle, endowed RGS as the City’s first school; that early philanthropic gift and social vision has been a constant throughout our almost half a millennium of existence. Our social responsibility remains at the forefront of our minds and is central to our future endeavours.
We believe that the RGS is uniquely placed to stretch and challenge bright young people, and consequently we have a well-deserved reputation for academic excellence, consistently outstripping national averages. Our students deliver phenomenal, nationally and internationally recognised achievements, with the RGS often cited as an asset when encouraging inward investment to the North East. However, we are an exceptional school in a relatively deprived area of the UK.
While we are convinced of the infinite potential of young people from the North East, the social mobility statistics in our region are some of the worst in the country and the challenges have been compounded by the pandemic. Too many children are missing opportunities afforded to others born elsewhere. Our model of a highly academic education ought to be available to any child who is intellectually curious, able and aspiring, and who would benefit from a fast paced and challenging curriculum through RGS Bursaries and RGS Partnerships. RGS Bursaries open access to our school for children who could not otherwise attend, which creates deep and generational impact for both bursary children and their families; meanwhile, RGS Partnerships encompass the variety of ways we collaborate with state schools to deliver broad impact to bright, capable children from across the region.
We are incredibly proud of our achievements as well as being ambitious about what more RGS can accomplish. In the last year, over 40 RGS Partnerships projects have taken place, including STEAM, Sport, Languages, Classics, Debating, UCAS Mentoring and much more. 76 different schools across the region were involved in RGS Partnerships activities and more than 300 teachers received 1,500 hours of CPD or collaborated on curriculum development. Over 7,300 individual students in local state schools benefitted from RGS Partnerships activities, for a total 23,000 hours. We are particularly grateful to the Reece Foundation, who a year ago provided funding for a Maths teacher and a Physics teacher to make much of this work possible.
As of September, British Engines have also now generously funded an Engineering/Robotics teacher. We believe this is a genuinely scaleable and sustainable way of helping to raise aspirations and attainment across the region with the potential to span across a wide range of academic disciplines. We would like to engage with any organisation willing to support this effort.
Building on this success, we are also now setting up a School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) hub to train people to become Maths and Physics teachers in the region with trainees being placed in our partnership schools. There are significant financial incentives for people taking this route into teaching and we would encourage anyone who is interested to get in touch with us or meet us at the Get Into Teaching event at St James’ Park on 30 November.
Together we can make a positive impact on the life chances of so many!