The Helsinki Normal Lyceum, more commonly known as Norssi, is a teacher training school that operates under the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the University of Helsinki and comprises comprehensive school grades 1–5 and 7–9 and a general upper secondary school. Norssi hosts approximately 400 comprehensive school pupils and 245 general upper secondary school students. Each year, the general upper secondary school admits 80 new students. We admit comprehensive school pupils mainly from the school’s local catchment area in Southern Helsinki, with the exception of the Latin class, to which admission is based on an aptitude test.
Norssi’s long history as a classical school manifests in the fact that we are one of the few Finnish schools that offer Latin studies from the 7th grade onward. Our school also has a Latin motto: Non scholae sed vitae, meaning that we do not learn for school, but for life.