The school was established in 1936 when two boys high schools amalgamated and moved to the present premises situated in the Bežigrad district. Since 1947, it has been coeducational: there are usually about sixty per cent girls and forty per cent boys attending our school.

There have been a few state reforms of the educational programme which have affected this school over the years. In the 1950s, a major reform introduced eight years of compulsory elementary education (instead of four) and four years of facultative secondary education (instead of 8). Consequently ever since, Gimnazija Bežigrad has been offering a four year high school programme. It was named First Gimnazija Bežigrad in 1959 until 1982 when it was changed to Sciences and Mathematics School due to a reform that made sciences and mathematics the main streams of the programme of the entire school. With the reintroduction of the general high school programme, the name of the school was again changed to the present Gimnazija Bežigrad.

The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme was introduced for the first time in September 1990 when a group of twenty Slovene students was admitted into the first year of the Diploma programme. Since then, we have had twenty national students doing the IB Diploma in English every year. The IB Diploma is a challenging programme which successfully co-exists beside the equally demanding National Matura. Gimnazija Bežigrad started admitting foreign students in 1993 into its two International Baccalaureate Organisation programmes: The Middle Years Programme (MYP) for grade nine and ten students and the IB Diploma for grade 11 and 12 students. This new department, the International Department, serves the needs of foreign students who have found Slovenia as a temporary home. They attend either international programmes at a fee. Students who attended the first three years of the Middle Years programme offered at Danila Kumar Elementary School, are admitted directly into the Middle Years programme at our school, whereas the IB diploma programme is available only to those who have reached above average results in the last two years of the Middle Years programme of in a comparable programme.