A List of Top Ranking Grammar Schools in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland has fewer than 70 grammar schools. Just like in England, some achieve better results than the others, while their rankings tend to vary from one ‘top list’ to another as well as from year to year. Listed below are some of currently the highest ranking grammar schools in Northern Ireland (in no particular order):
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St Louis Grammar School, Ballymena (County Antrim). Listed high on most lists of top performing grammar schools in Northern Ireland, St Louis Grammar School was founded in 1924 as a high school for Catholic girls in the town of Ballymena. Over the following years, the number of pupils continued to grow and in the 1950s, the students and their teachers moved to a newly built school building. In 1970, the girls-only grammar school became co-educational.
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Portadown College, Portadown (County Antrim). Founded in 1924 as a fee-paying voluntary grammar school, the Portadown College is today one of the highest ranking grammar schools in Northern Ireland. It is also famous for its impressive list of notable former pupils such as Dame Mary Peters, Waldo Maguire, Newton Emerson, brothers Simon and Rory Best, Gloria Hunniford and Colin Turkington, to mention only a few.
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Sullivan Upper School, Holywood (County Down). The school is perhaps best known for the 1994 attack by a former pupil who seriously wounded three students with a flame thrower. But it is also known for excellent performance, especially when it comes to A-Level. The co-educational and inter-denominal grammar school was established in 1877 and educated many notable Northern Irish people.
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Belfast High School, Belfast. One of the most respected and desirable grammar schools in Northern Ireland’s capital dates back to 1854 when it was founded by John Pyper as the Pyper Academy. In addition to consistently achieving excellent results, Belfast High School is also renowned for being one of only a few schools to be awarded the Specialist Status for Languages. In 2013, it also received the European Language Label, and won two International Schools Awards since 2008.
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Friends’ School, Lisburn (County Antrim, County Down). Established in 1774, the Friends’ School in Lisburn is one of only two and one of only nine Quaker voluntary grammar schools in Northern Ireland and the UK, respectively. Declared Northern Ireland’s top school by the Sunday Times in 2011, the Friends’ School is consistently ranked high by the majority of lists of best secondary schools in the country.