Royal Belfast Academical Institution

The Royal Belfast Academical Institution is an independent grammar school in Belfast, Northern Ireland. With the support of Belfast's leading reformers and democrats, it opened its doors in 1814. Until 1849, when it was superseded by what today is Queen's University, the institution pioneered Belfast's first programme of collegiate education. Locally referred to as Inst, the modern school educates boys from ages 11 to 18. It is one of the eight Northern Irish schools represented on the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. The school occupies an 18-acre site in the centre of the city on which its first buildings were erected. History Dissident foundation William Bruce wrote in 1806 in denunciation of "visionary notions" to establish an academical institution that "[t]his town has from some years been in possession of an excellent plan of school education for which it is indebted to the Belfast Academy funded in 1786". What was to become the school was not the first visionary notion of William Drennan to be opposed by Bruce, the principal of the Belfast Academy. In the 1790s, Drennan and his Society of United Irishmen had called for complete and immediate Catholic Emancipation and for a radical and democratic reform of the Irish Parliament.