Royal Wanstead School

The Royal National Children's Foundation (RNCF) is a British charity which helps children facing abuse, neglect or trauma at home by providing them with the opportunity to move into a supported education environment.The RNCF currently enables nearly 400 vulnerable and disadvantaged children to attend state and independent boarding schools and day schools. As well as paying school fees, the RNCF also funds counselling, educational school trips and holidays for vulnerable children, many of whom have never had a holiday.

The RNCF is the successor charity to an organisation founded as an orphanage by Dr Andrew Reed in 1827. From 1842 (when Queen Victoria became the first Patron), it was successively known as the Infant Orphan Asylum, the Royal Infant Orphanage, the Royal Wanstead School, and the Royal Wanstead Children's Foundation. The school was based at Wanstead on the edge of Epping Forest in grand buildings that today house the Snaresbrook Crown Court. The charity was merged in December 2010 with the Joint Educational Trust (JET), with which it has been closely collaborating for some 25 years. JET was founded in the 1970s by a group of prep school head teachers. The first JET chairman was wartime hero Group Captain Douglas Bader.

The Royal National Children's Foundation no longer operates its own boarding schools but helps to support vulnerable children at a range of boarding schools throughout the United Kingdom. These young people have one or no active parents and have suffered some degree of abuse, neglect, fear and disruption in their home, family or school environment such as to be seriously prejudicial to their normal development.

RNCF has supported 3,000 vulnerable, disadvantaged children at some 150 different boarding schools since the closure of its own schools in 1971. It describes this work as Assisted Boarding but it also supports some vulnerable children (up to the age of 13) at independent day schools.

It funds the schooling of these beneficiaries by putting together packages with the support of other charities and the schools themselves. In this way, RNCF leverages its own funds some seven times (x 7) so that a RNCF grant of c£4,000 can effectively secure the fees for a vulnerable young person at an independent boarding school for a whole year. Coupled with the charity's low administrative costs, this helps ensure that a very large proportion of all donations and legacies go direct to paying fees for these disadvantaged young people.

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