John Smith, RGS Director of Partnerships.
RGS Partnerships
John Smith, RGS Director of Partnerships.
RGS Partnerships is a collaboration between RGS and local state schools to share teaching and learning opportunities across the North East. The initiative provides workshops, mentoring, and teacher training, alongside access to RGS facilities, resources and extracurricular activities, particularly to children in disadvantaged areas. This work reaches more than 10,000 children from around 100 schools every year.
At the Royal Grammar School we are showing that when independent schools invest their charitable relief in genuinely two-way partnerships with local schools, the results can be transformational. We are proud of our broad programme of impactful activities, which was recognised in the accolade of Independent School of the Year award for Educational Partnerships in Autumn 2023.
In the last academic year, our partnerships programme reached children from over 100 local schools, with roughly half primary and half secondary. We have built a sustainable scheme of 88 activities from STEM to Sport, reaching over 10,000 young people each year, often from the areas of greatest disadvantage in a city with pockets of 40% child poverty. The key to growing this work has been a genuine spirit of co-creation: it is very much a conscious decision to replace the word ‘outreach’ (with its connotations of patronage), to ‘partnerships’, providing a better description of our collaborative approach.
Historically, partnership work has drawn on the goodwill of individual staff and spare capacity in the independent sector: this approach tended to result in projects that lacked longitudinal impact. We have developed a model that is both sustainable and scalable by bringing together local business and charitable foundations to pool resources towards common local goals. This spirit of co-missioning has allowed us to build a collaborative model supporting a team of STEM teachers across Maths, Physics, Robotics and Computing. These teachers deliver and facilitate a range of projects alongside local teachers, schools and organisations.
In 2024-25, we were excited to bring this model to Rugby, thanks to the support and vision of England Rugby, who are part-funding a new community role, working partly in RGS and partly in local schools.
Independent schools can play an important role in a thriving school eco-system. For a school like RGS Newcastle, coming up to its 500th anniversary, there is a real sense of custodianship among governors towards the broader educational benefit of the school. They tend to think in decades and centuries, rather than electoral cycles.
In the current climate of educational crises around recruitment, retention, attendance, mental health and much more, we must move forward in a spirit of partnership and collaboration if we are to unlock the infinite potential of our young people.
As one governor put it to me recently: “It takes a city to educate its children”.
Physics Partnership challenge.
“Cross-sector work can be transformational, but only when rooted in mutual respect and humility.”
John Smith, RGS Director of Partnerships