History of the school

Szent László Gimnázium was founded in 1907, under the name ‘Main State Secondary Grammar School of the Tenth District’.  At that time, it had 119 students in three classes.  The first school-leaving exams took place in 1914, and the school moved to its present location, to a brand new building in 1915.

 In 1921, the school was renamed after the great Hungarian king, Saint László, and the standard of teaching began to rise year by year.

 The Second World War disrupted the operation of the school.  The 1943-44 academic year came to an end on 31 March, and the building was then used first by the German and then by the Soviet army.  Several teachers and students went to fight in the war, and many of them died.

 Instruction was resumed in September 1944.  Difficult though this school year was, school-leaving exams were held the following spring.  This was the first academic year when female students and female teachers were admitted.  Everybody contributed in some way to the reconstruction of the building, and the school was more or less back to normal by 1946.

 Standards began to rise again, and soon the school became one of the best in Budapest. Specialised classes started in 1958, first in languages, then, after 1965, in the sciences and in art.  Szent László Gimnázium became a UNESCO-associated school in 1967.  That is when school life became ‘more international’: relationships with foreign schools were established, student exchange programmes and meetings for teachers and students were first organised.

By the time the first Italian-Hungarian bilingual class was established in 1988, the school was already renowned for its high standards in the teaching of Italian.  In these bilingual classes, students have two or three times more language classes than the students in the other specialised classes, and they also study certain subjects in Italian.

 The school building was renovated and modernised from top to bottom during the 1990s.   New classrooms were added, old classrooms were refurbished and tailored to teachers’ and students’ needs, a new, second gymnasium was built and the school’s courtyard was renovated and improved.

In 2003, Szent László Gimnázium was among the first schools in Hungary to take part in the ‘nyelvi előkészítő osztály’ ('YILL' - Year of Intensive Language Learning’) programme.  That is when the E (sciences) class became a 5-year class in which students focus heavily on English in the first year. The following year, the F (media and computer studies) class followed suit.

The school participated in EU-funded projects to improve social mobility (TÁMOP).