In 2023, the Royal Latin School celebrated its 600th anniversary – a truly momentous year, filled with nostalgia, tribute and celebration. This significant milestone provided us with a really special opportunity to welcome lots of visitors into the school, to reflect on the school’s values, culture and heritage, and to plan for the future.

Now that our anniversary year is over and 2024 is here, everyone is keen to know what else the Development team is focusing on – so here’s a flavour!

Alumni

The 600th anniversary underlined just how much the school means to people, and that our students carry meaningful memories of their school days for the rest of their lives. Former students are always warmly welcomed back to the Royal Latin, and we will continue to listen to their memories and experiences. We’ll continue to encourage Old Latins to stay in touch with the school, and with each other, and to enable them to contribute to school like today through sharing expertise, talks, volunteering and mentoring. As we head into our seventh century, supporting these relationships with our alumni community will remain at the forefront of what we do.

600 Campaign: Phase 3 

We’ll continue to improve the teaching and learning environment too. It has long been our intention to build an Arts Centre at the school, and we’ll develop those exciting plans much further during the course of 2024. We’ll share our plans – both for the building and for the ambitious fundraising campaign required to fund it – as soon as we can. In the meantime, we’ll continue to build partnerships and welcome donations to the school, whether to departments or buildings or to our archive, so that we can both conserve our heritage and ensure that we can continue to innovate and improve what we can offer in our classrooms day to day.

Community & Charter

The anniversary enabled us to restate our commitments to the community and to looking after our local environment and planet, and we will continue to fulfil these pledges into 2024 and beyond through our anniversary Charter. Students and staff logged a spectacular 5,823 hours of volunteering during 2023, and volunteering will remain an important part of school life moving forwards – something we’ll celebrate through our annual Extraordinary People Awards scheme.

So – our remit, and the scale of the challenge before us, remains as large as ever! Needless to say, please do get in touch with me direct if you’d like to know more or want to get involved in the months ahead. In the meantime, a heartfelt thank you from the Development team for all of your encouragement and enthusiasm during our anniversary year, we really do appreciate it!

Jo Ballantine

Director of Development

jballantine@royallatin.org