How alumni associations create schools for life

The most compelling promise any educational institution can make is that it will not stop caring for and nurturing its students after they have gone through the school gates for the last time.

The word “alumni” has been misunderstood for so long that most of us have stopped noticing. It comes from the Latin alere, which means to nourish, to bring up, to help someone grow into who they are meant to become. “Alumni” was never a backward-looking word associated with nostalgia . It was always about continuing forward and looking to the future.

Yet for most schools, whether Catholic, independent or state, the alumni association is the part of the institution that has changed the least in the past century. Its existence is typically visible via a magazine published twice a year, an annual reunion dinner and a polite request for a donation. The pattern has barely shifted since alumni structures were formalised in the 1800s in the US and copied wholesale into British schooling.

That model served a world that no longer exists. A generation ago, a good education was a golden ticket. That assumption no longer holds. The World Economic Forum estimates around two-fifths of current skills will become outdated within five years. Careers are now non-linear, with AI rewriting whole professions. And loneliness has emerged as one of the most serious challenges to mental health. This is precisely the landscape in which alumni associations could matter most, and in which most of them quietly do not.

Most alumni associations ask how they can keep their alumni engaged, not what they are actually for, or how they benefit alumni. An alumni association is a school’s natural after care system, the place where formation becomes accompaniment, and where the long arc of an education could continue into adult life. For Catholic schools in particular, this is cura personalis, “care of the whole person”. We need formation at every life stage, not only in adolescence.

The President’s Fund at my former school, Stonyhurst College, which supports alumni who have fallen on hard times through illness or unemployment, is one quiet expression of this. Any school that takes seriously the idea that education is about improving lives, and not passing exams, has the same obligation. Worth School’s alumni association, recognised in 2024 by The Week’s Independent Schools Guide for “great alumni mentoring”, runs a structured mentoring programme, work placement support and an annual careers event in London connecting former students across professions. Its manager, Mary Lou Burge, describes a Worthian as someone who has a lifelong relationship rather than a leaving certificate.

Westcliff High School for Girls, a selective state grammar in Essex, relaunched a long standing Old Girls’ Association, and within a few years had re-engaged hundreds of younger alumnae as mentors and supporters. This is not a private-school story. The charity Future First now supports more than 1,200 alumni networks in UK state schools and col leges, with more than a quarter of a million former students registered. Their research found that 30 per cent of state-school alumni would give to their old school if asked.

The slower educational institutions respond, the quicker alumni move on. My own generation, Gen Z, will be the most discerning judges of this. We will not extend loyalty to institutions that treat us as a database entry. Our faces and voices, as Pope Leo wrote in his message for the sixtieth World Day of Social Communications, are the unique and distinctive features of every person, something sacred that must not be dimmed by technology and its growing influence in our lives. That, in the end, is the test any alumni association must pass. If a former student is remembered and cherished through the full arc of adulthood as the unique individual they are, they will participate and contribute; if not, no communication strategy can recover the relationship.

I worked in politics before going on to become a research associate in constitutional law at the University of Cambridge . The thread running through all of it was a fascination with how institutions make people feel seen, heard and understood – or fail to. In an era of profound, unpredictable change, with AI reshaping how we acquire knowledge, schools, colleges and universities must offer what machines cannot, namely relationship, formation and moral imagination.

Catholic schools, in particular, are called to lead this shift from teaching for exams to caring for life. I first became interested in alumni work after attending the tenth Congress of the World Union of Jesuit Alumni in Barcelona in 2022. It was an impressive event but I was struck by the absence of significant practical engagement with the working lives of younger alumni. The experience led me to found Alluminate, and to develop the Alumni Vitality Index, which measures alumni flourishing across six dimensions, from purpose and wellbeing to economic resilience, belonging, agency and soul alignment. We are now pioneering a more personalised model of care and investment in how alumni evolve over a lifetime.

The first wave of alumni relations was the social club. The second, the one most schools still operate within, was the development office, founded for fundraising. The third wave is care. This treats the former student as someone whose adult life remains the school’s concern, and recognises that the most credible promise any school can make is that the formation pupils receive will continue beyond the school gates. We know that parents value evidence that the care their children receive at school is being honoured into adult life. This is what AI cannot replicate. Machines cannot accompany a person through a career change, a life transition or a return to faith. That work, the work of alere, remains human.

For Catholic schools in particular, this is not a marketing question. It is a theological one. If education is the formation of a whole person, then the alumni association is where that formation either continues or ends. A dormant association is a statement. A thriving one is a statement too. The question for any school, whether independent or state, Catholic or secular, is: does your alumni association complete the promise of your school’s education, or has it become an afterthought, present in the brochure, absent in the lived experience? The word “alumni” has been waiting for us to rediscover what it really means.

Joanna George is the founder and CEO of Alluminate, which designs alumni associations for private schools internationally.