There is, however, evidence that concentration on a single site and within a single building was favoured increasingly (as was the pattern elsewhere in Britain and the transatlantic colonies, from which many of the early Academy subscriptions came) in the later eighteenth century, and that the grammar school would be the focus of this, notably during the Rectorship of Hector Fraser, who taught many of the merchants and lawyers involved in the establishment of the Royal Academy, which was from the first an innovative and self-contained project aiming, as its first minute book amply demonstrates, to provide something like a stepping stone to full university status for the burgh, with a curriculum designed in the light of the ideas of the Enlightenment and dominated not by the Classics but by the sciences and mathematics.

For the first quarter-century of the academy's existence something like this ideal was sustained, and the appointments of its Rectors showed a bias towards the emerging sciences - for example that of Alexander Nimmo, who became a disciple of Telford, and left in 1811 to work on civil engineering projects in the West of Ireland.

From the opening of the academy in 1792 (when pupils came from all over the Highlands and across the Atlantic, especially the Caribbean - some are shown in the surviving rolls as "coloured") a continuous existence can safely be traced, in which major milestones after 1792 were the adaptation to compulsory schooling after 1872, and the demands of the professions generally, which led to the establishment of the new building on the Crown in 1895.

On 28 April 1962 when the school's outdoor club was climbing on Stac Pollaidh, a 15-year-old boy slipped and fell 40 feet to his death.

There was movement in the 1950s and 1960s (when Gaelic speaking pupils from the Western Isles were still accepted and housed in the Hostel on Culduthel Road) from fee-paying and selectivity to the status of area comprehensive in the mid and late 1970s, again on a new site.

The second Floor has the English, Gaelic, Modern Languages (French, German and Spanish) and Maths classrooms as well as a computer room and 2 unisex toilets.