Royal Kentalis has more than 225 years of history. On April 14th in 1790, the Walloon Reverend Henri Daniel Guyot took the initiative to start teaching deaf children in Groningen in the North of the Netherlands. He started out with a classroom of 14 students.
After this, more pioneers started schools for the deaf. Together, these pioneers laid the foundation for three institutes: Viataal (formerly Institute for the Deaf, IvD, in Sint-Michielsgestel), Koninklijke Effatha Guyot Groep and Sint Marie where the knowledge expanded in deaf education, but also expertise in the field of hard-of-hearing, deafblindness, autism, multisensory handicaps and specific language disorders. These three organizations merged in 2010 into the Royal Kentalis.