RGS Newcastle

The Royal Grammar School (RGS), Newcastle upon Tyne, was founded in 1525 by Thomas Horsley, Mayor of Newcastle and a wealthy mercer, under royal licence. The royal foundation was confirmed by Queen Elizabeth I in 1599, hence the school's title. RGS is one of only seven schools in the United Kingdom to bear the name "Royal Grammar School" and is the oldest institution of learning in Newcastle upon Tyne. It became fully co-educational in 2008, after nearly 500 years as a boys-only school. Today it is an HMC day school of around 1,323 pupils aged 7-18, located in Jesmond, immediately north of Newcastle city centre.

The Headmaster since 2017 is Geoffrey Stanford, previously of Westminster Cathedral Choir School and senior posts at Worth and Wellington. The school is organised into four houses — Collingwood, Eldon, Horsley and Stowell — named after Old Novocastrians or local civic worthies. The Junior School (7-11) and Senior School (11-18) share a unified Jesmond campus.

RGS Newcastle's most internationally famous twentieth-century alumnus is Cardinal Basil Hume OM, who attended in the 1930s before reading modern languages at St Benet's Hall, Oxford. He became Abbot of Ampleforth, then Archbishop of Westminster from 1976 until his death in 1999 — leading the Catholic Church in England and Wales through some of its most transformative decades. The actor and comedian Rowan Atkinson CBE was at RGS Newcastle on a scholarship in the 1960s before reading engineering at Newcastle University; Blackadder, Mr Bean and the Johnny English franchise followed.

The school's broader alumni list includes the historian Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, the polemicist who exposed the Hitler Diaries hoax; the BBC Today presenter Brian Redhead; multiple Russell Group academics and Newcastle United directors. RGS Newcastle operates a substantial bursary programme funded by Old Novocastrian donations and continues to combine top-tier A-Level performance with strong North East rooting.