Portal:Scotland/Selected article/Week 33, 2012



The Royal High School (RHS) of Edinburgh is a co-educational state school administered by the City of Edinburgh Council. The school was founded in 1128 and is one of the oldest schools in Scotland. It serves 1200 pupils drawn from four feeder primaries in the north-west of the city: Blackhall, Clermiston, Cramond and Davidson's Mains. The school's national profile has given it a flagship role in education, piloting such experiments as the introduction of the Certificate of Secondary Education, the provision of setting in English and mathematics, and the curricular integration of European Studies and the International Baccalaureate.

The Royal High School is, by one reckoning, the eighteenth-oldest school in the world, with a history of almost 900 years. Historians associate its birth with the flowering of the twelfth-century renaissance. It first enters the historical record as the seminary of Holyrood Abbey, founded for Alwin and the Augustinian canons by David I in 1128. In 1505 the school became the first in Britain to be designated a high school. In 1566, following the Reformation, Mary, Queen of Scots, transferred the school from the control of Holyrood Abbey to Edinburgh Town Council, and from about 1590 James VI accorded it royal patronage as the Schola Regia Edimburgensis.