[4] In 2009, The Australian declared Geelong Grammar to be the "most expensive school in the nation", charging a fee of almost $29,000 for a Year 12 student.

The Royal Commission found that consecutive principals and administration had failed to report allegation and protect students.

The school closed due to financial difficulties in 1860, only to reopen in 1863 with J. Bracebridge Wilson, who had been third master under Vance, as headmaster.

[9] For many years Wilson ran the school at his own expense and through this time boarders came to comprise the greater part of the student body.

Upon the death of Wilson in 1895, Cuthbertson became acting head master until the appointment of Leonard Harford Lindon early in the next year.

Lindon ran the school for 15 years, but was never fully accepted by the old boys because he lacked the personal warmth[according to whom?]

In 1909, the school purchased a substantial amount of land in the then rural Geelong suburb of Belmont, bounded by Thomson, Regent and Scott Streets, and Roslyn Road.

[10] These plans had faded by August 1911, when adjoining rural land was offered for sale as the Belmont Hill Estate.

[10] At the end of 1913 the school left its old buildings near the centre of Geelong and opened at its expansive new site at Corio in February 1914.

Upon Brown's retirement in 1929 the school council set out to find a 40-year-old married priest as the next head master, but they ended up choosing James Ralph Darling, a 30-year-old layman and bachelor.

He attracted many acclaimed in their fields to work as masters at the school, including the historian Manning Clark, the musician Sir William McKie, and the artist Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack.

He took the school down a liberal path, most notably in early steps towards co-education, with girls from Geelong Church of England Girls' Grammar School "The Hermitage" taking certain classes at Corio by the early 1970s, but also by making chapel non-compulsory; a policy later reversed.

Under the leadership of Lewis the school set about renovating the boarding and day houses to bring them up to more acceptable modern standards, and there was a focus on improving academic results in addition to the generally rounded education offered.

In part, this was achieved through introducing timetable flexibility to allow able later-year high-school students to undertake Victorian Certificate of Education studies ahead of their cohort.

The later years of Lewis' head mastership saw an effort (which has been largely successful) to make the school less hierarchical.

The period since Lewis has seen two head masterships of Lister Hannah and Nicholas Sampson and, in 2004, the appointment of Stephen Meek.

Geelong Grammar offers its senior students a choice of the International Baccalaureate (IB) or the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE).

[19] Among the school's notable alumni are Charles III, King of Australia; media mogul Rupert Murdoch; actress Portia de Rossi; John Gorton, Prime Minister of Australia 1968–1971; Mizan Zainal Abidin of Terengganu, King of Malaysia 2006–2011; Tim Macartney-Snape, mountaineer and author; billionaire businessman Kerry Packer; singer-songwriter Missy Higgins; Entrepreneur and Climate 200 Founder Simon Holmes à Court.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard evidence about five decades of complaints at the school.

[20] During that exchange, the Geelong Advertiser reported that the school lawyer was warned by the Royal Commission for referring to the ex-student by his actual name during the proceedings, in spite of the abuse victim requesting anonymity.

Referred to as "BKO" by the commission, the witness described the school's Timbertop campus, where King Charles III spent two terms in 1966, as "similar to Lord of the Flies".

Local media report that another former student, described as "BKM", told the commission that Geelong Grammar should repay the fees of abuse victims.