120 years of Champittet #5 - Acceleration: from canons to globalisation

This year marks the 120th anniversary of Collège Champittet. Follow us and discover, each month, the events that have shaped the history of Collège Champittet.

In 1998, the canons were no longer numerous or young enough to assume all their missions. They sold the Collège to two lay associates: Jérôme de Meyer, owner of the Collège Alpin Beau-Soleil in Villars and former student of Champittet, and Philippe Gudin, director of the Institut Le Rosey in Rolle. Both hired principals, entrusted the academic direction to Roland Lomenech, who served the school for a total of 38 years, assisted by the energetic primary school principal Thierry Germanier, and presided over a successful development phase in the 2000s.

French-English bilingualism was introduced in 2006 and the International Baccalaureate (IB) in 2009, a year in which the two owners kept the real estate but handed over the management of the school to an ambitious international group, Nord Anglia Education. While all went well at first, the culture shock of globalization caused turmoil and a crisis between 2012 and 2014. The Collège's own identity was reaffirmed in 2015 and a series of innovations were launched to put the Collège back on the path to growth: emphasis on leadership, junior entrepreneurship, forest school school, not to mention very good results in the final exams.

In 2016, the Institut Catholique Mont-Olivet in Lausanne closed its doors and about 100 students joined Champittet.

What can we learn from it? As a Swiss school open to the world, Collège Champittet differs from other private schools in a way that can be expressed as follows: the most international of Swiss schools and the most Swiss of international schools. The Collège's pedagogical project places French as the first language, English as the second and German as the third. It thus offers an adequate solution to Swiss families who wish to prepare themselves for the globalized world, and to foreign families who have a long-term project for life in French-speaking Switzerland.

Collège Champittet is firmly rooted in its region, with its head above the clouds, and flourishes around its own values.

Read also:

• The founding of the school and its DNA
• Our logo, a wonderful mistake
• The creator of the Olympic Games motto  featured on the stained glass windows of the school chapel
• Transmission to the canons