A novel route has been developed to a diverse range of chiral and achiral 2-aryloxazolyl ligands, compounds which have previously seen little attention due to the difficulty of their synthesis via traditional methods. These ligands possess many promising characteristics for the formation of novel catalysts with high oxidation state metal centres and for the formation of luminescent devices. Using our method ligands are synthesized simply in three steps from readily available and inexpensive aryloxide and amino alcohol starting materials. The method can be applied to ligands with electron-donating/-withdrawing and sterically demanding/undemanding substituents, and can conveniently be scaled-up to give >25 g of final product. Complexes of these ligands have been made with Al3+ and Ln3+ metal centres and display promising characteristics for catalytic activity including evidence of chiral self-assembly and hemilability. As such an exciting new class of complexes have been opened up for research and it is hoped that this will lead to the development of new and interesting asymmetric catalysts. Elements of this research have been published: Aspinall, H. C.; Beckingham, O.; Farrar, M. D.; Greeves, N.; Thomas, C. D.; Tetrahedron Letters 52 (2011) 5120–5123