Ancient schools like Highgate are fascinating creatures. They reflect each of the ages through which they evolve, but they can also be bold, ambitious, and even resistant to the status quo. This has been true of Highgate from its inception in 1565 right through to the present day.
The man who sought permission from Queen Elizabeth I to found ‘a grammar school for boys in the village of Highgate’ must have known the potential of education to transform a young person’s future: it had certainly transformed his. The son of Sir Richard Cholmeley, a warrior knight who ended his career as Henry VIII’s Lieutenant of the Tower of London, he had made his way in the world as one of the brightest legal minds of his generation, training as a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn in London. Ambitious, driven, and talented, he had navigated the incarnadine politics of Tudor England to reach the rank of Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench under Edward VI. He had suffered brief imprisonment under Queen Mary, before being released to serve her as faithfully as her father and half-brother before her. And when Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, and he was an old man seeking a foundation to bear his name through the ages, he could look back on a life that had seen more danger than most. The English Reformation, the whims of successive Tudor monarchs, the bubonic plague, wars with Scotland and France, the persecution of Protestants and Catholics alike: he had survived all this. And his name was Sir Roger Cholmeley.
Grammar schools had existed in one form or another for centuries, closely linked to Catholic places of worship. But in Protestant England, they expanded in number significantly, and placed more emphasis on moral reform, answering a growing demand for a humanist education which closely connected learning to a virtuous life and a civilised society. And so it was that Sir Roger secured permission from Queen Elizabeth to found a grammar school in Highgate, not far from where he lived, providing ‘the most liberal education and instruction of boys and young men’. He died three weeks later, on 21 June 1565.
The earliest recorded schoolhouse was a timber building some thirty feet long and twelve feet wide, placed somewhere on the site of where Chapel Quad is today. In 1576, the governors were able to raise enough money to replace this with a brick schoolhouse and chapel, and in the centuries which followed, successive governors and headmasters honoured Roger Cholmeley’s wishes by educating poor boys from the local area; by the eighteenth century, they were also providing accommodation and education for girls in the almshouses which still stand to this day, opposite the School Museum on Southwood Lane.
One of its most famous pupils by this time was Nicholas Rowe, who would go on to become Poet Laureate and rests now in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Highgate had been his school in the late seventeenth century, and it is tempting to think that Rowe’s experiences of learning there, and then at Westminster, instilled in him the belief that education was indispensable to the improvement of wider society through the formation of young people’s characters; or as he put it in one poem, ‘To unlock the secret Treasures of the Mind, / And make the Blessing common to Mankind.’
And yet, like any ancient institution, Highgate’s fortunes waned as well as waxed, and when the Rev. John Bradley Dyne arrived at Highgate as its new headmaster in 1838, he found the school in a sorry state. Pupil numbers had fallen, and there was a real risk the school might close. But by the time he retired in 1874, the school was buzzing with energy. The UK’s great Liberal Party Prime Minister, William Gladstone, declared Highgate was no longer just a ‘local establishment’ but one that had ‘taken its place among those great public schools which are the glory of England.’
Dyne had transformed not just Highgate’s fortunes, but the very shape of English secondary education, viewing it as more than just a route to university and future employment. He saw that brilliant teachers went beyond their own academic expertise to nurture their pupils’ spiritual development, their selflessness, and their integrity, at the same time as their drive to succeed. This proved hugely appealing to his contemporaries who sent their children to Highgate, and remains central to its ethos today.
The dramatic increase in Highgate’s popularity under Dyne’s leadership also owed a great deal to the curricular reforms he instigated. By promoting the study of English Literature at a time when very few other schools did so, Dyne saw its study as an opportunity to foster young people’s empathy and moral development, and, above all, their creativity and imagination. This was the environment in which a teenage Gerard Manley Hopkins flourished: another pupil who would become one of England’s great poets. The seeds of his literary imagination were nurtured at Highgate, where he read widely in the beautiful new library that Dyne had placed at the heart of the school. Another pupil who benefited from Dyne’s reforms was John Venn, who thrived on the rigorous education Dyne established; Venn went on to become a leading mathematician at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and to this day, children across the UK learn how to use Venn Diagrams in mathematics.
By the 1920s, Highgate was one of the first schools in the country to offer pupils cutting-edge lessons in the sciences and aeronautics: its purpose-built Science Block was opened by the UK Secretary of State for Air in 1928. Its superb laboratories were topped by a full-size Avro 504K aeroplane in a hangar on the roof; on the ground floor was a Sopwith Snipe biplane along with five aircraft engines. For these resources and the popular lessons in aeronautics and engineering, pupils could thank another bold headmaster, John Johnston, who believed that education should equip children with all the skills they needed to excel in the rapidly changing world around them.
The headship of Richard Kennedy from 1989 to 2006 was pivotal to Highgate’s evolution to one of the UK’s leading coeducational day schools in the twenty-first century. He saw that the demand for places for day pupils was growing fast at the same time as the interest in boarding places was falling, and took the decision to phase out the school’s boarding houses in the 1990s. He also saw that coeducation would benefit every child at Highgate immeasurably, welcoming both girls and boys to Highgate in 2004. In this there was the echo of Highgate’s tradition of embracing change, and the effects since then are unmistakable. Ask any Highgate pupil and they will tell you their school is a place where every person is valued as an individual, and that the principles of equality and fairness permeate school life. And any Highgate teacher will tell you that with an equal number of women and men across the staff body, and a balance of boys and girls across subjects and in the pupil leadership teams, a culture of mutual respect sees us come together to respond to all number of issues with empathy and care.
Today Highgate remains true to its proud tradition, thanks to the leadership of Adam Pettitt, the school’s Head since 2006. Its central mission to provide an education in the fullest and richest sense, both inside and outside of the classroom, has seen the demand for places reach new heights. The widening of its reach in the local community has also won national acclaim for Highgate. Since 2008, its Chrysalis Partnerships programme has worked with over fifty partner state schools, inspiring pupils from primary to sixth form. Most famously of all, in 2017 Highgate helped to found the London Academy of Excellence, Tottenham: a sixth form free school, and Highgate’s flagship school partner since then. At both schools children are taught how to think for themselves, how to put their skills to the service of others, and how commitment, resilience, and collaboration enable inspiring change.
Small wonder, then, that Highgate’s energy and willingness to challenge the status quo see it in the Top 10 independent schools in London and the Top 20 schools nationally. It is, perhaps, more than Sir Roger Cholmeley could have imagined: that his small foundation in Highgate Village would, centuries later, be transforming the lives of more young people than ever before.
About the author Dr Benjamin Dabby, Head of History and Assistant Head of Sixth Form Benjamin is the author of several publications, including Loyal to the crown: the extraordinary life of Sir Roger Cholmeley (2015) and Women as public moralists in Britain: from the bluestockings to Virginia Woolf (2017). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
