About Emanuel School
Emanuel School aims to foster a thirst for knowledge and a real commitment to learning. We want our students to communicate in a confident, articulate and informed manner. We encourage our students to make informed judgements about what is right and wrong. We show, and ask for respect and we encourage good behaviour at all times.
We teach our students the importance of caring for others and for the environment.
We teach our students skills for later in life: social, physical and practical. And we are particularly passionate about achieving excellence in art, music, drama and sport.
But the starting point at Emanuel is to create a safe and caring community - a place where girls and boys can grow and thrive.
Most of all we want our students to actually enjoy being at school.
History
Emanuel is school with a long and distinguished history.
Emanuel School is one of three schools administered by the United Westminster Schools' Foundation. It came into being by the will of Anne Sackville, Lady Dacre, dated 1594. Unusually the school was coeducational from the very beginning. Lady Dacre wrote that one of the main aims of the Foundation should be for ‘the bringing up of children in virtue and good and laudable arts so that they might better live in time to come by their honest labour'. She initially made provision for twenty students: ten girls and ten boys.
With Lady Dacre's benefaction in 1594, Emanuel Hospital (almshouses and school), as it was first called, began. The children wore long brown tunics, rather similar in cut to those still worn by pupils at Christ's Hospital. Thanks to the interest of Queen Elizabeth I, cousin to Lady Dacre, a charter was drawn up, and the school and almshouses were established on a site at Tothill Fields, Westminster.
In 1883, the school sought larger, newer buildings for the children; and the boy boarders, as they all then were, moved to our present buildings on the edge of Wandsworth Common.
In 1994, the school celebrated its 400th anniversary with a visit from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Today the school is fully coeducational, but has grown in size to over 700 students.