History
In lieu of the establishment of Lurgan Model primary school in 1863, the town of Lurgan required a secondary education school which met the educational needs of the growing industrial town. The owner of a local brewery, Samuel Watts, set out plans for an endowment fund in his will for the formation of a middle class, secondary school which provided education to boys in Agriculture, Classics and English. After Watts’s death in February 1850, a Trustee Committee was formed to ensure the £9000 in Watts’s will would contribute towards creating a new school. However, it was not until December 1872 that the Trustee Committee had gathered enough funds to commence construction of the school. [4]
The school was established at a residence on Market Hill, Lurgan in March 1873. The first headmaster was E. V. Boulger of Dublin. The construction of the school buildings in the township of Brownlowsderry was completed in August 1873 and the school accepted its first cohort of students in October of the same year. [5]
Boulger was a Classical scholar and uncomfortable among small boys, and left in 1875, [6] to be replaced by William T. Kirkpatrick of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. Kirkpatrick oversaw the student population grow numerically and was responsible for the growth in academics at the college. Kirkpatrick retired in 1899 and James Cowan of Manchester Grammar School assumed principality of the college. Cowan was responsible for the introduction of Science education in the college in 1905 and the further integration of female student admission in 1918. Cowan retired in 1922 having failed to rectify the school's dwindling numbers with under 30 pupils enrolled when he retired. [7]
In 1968, it became 'a selective, non-denominational, co-educational 14-19 Grammar School, offering a predominantly academic education up to Advanced Level in a wide range of subjects.' [8]
A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching Latin, but more recently an academically oriented secondary school.
Lurgan is a town in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, near the southern shore of Lough Neagh. Lurgan is about 18 miles (29 km) south-west of Belfast and is linked to the city by both the M1 motorway and the Belfast–Dublin railway line. It had a population of about 28,634 at the 2021 UK census and is within the Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon district. For some purposes, Lurgan is treated as part of the "Craigavon Urban Area" along with neighbouring Craigavon and Portadown.
The education system in Northern Ireland differs from elsewhere in the United Kingdom, but is similar to the Republic of Ireland in sharing in the development of the national school system and serving a similar society with a relatively rural population. A child's age on 1 July determines the point of entry into the relevant stage of education in the region, whereas the relevant date in England and Wales is 1 September.
Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974; however, she was not one of the prize's recipients.
A secondary school or high school is an institution that provides secondary education and also usually includes the building where this takes place. Some secondary schools provide both lower secondary education and upper secondary education, i.e., both levels 2 and 3 of the ISCED scale, but these can also be provided in separate schools.
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Donaghcloney or Donacloney is a village, townland and civil parish in County Down, Northern Ireland. It lies on the River Lagan between Lurgan and Dromore. In the 2011 census it had a population of 1701. It is colloquially referred to as "The 'Cloney" by locals.
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Educate Together is an educational charity in Ireland which is the patron body to "equality-based, co-educational, child centred, and democratically run" schools. It was founded in 1984 to act as the patron body for the new multidenominational schools that opened after the establishment of the Dalkey School Project. As of 2019, Educate Together is the patron of 90 national schools in Ireland. In 2014 three Educate Together Second Level Schools opened in Dublin 15, Drogheda and Lucan along with the first Educate Together school outside Ireland, in Bristol in the United Kingdom. In joint patronage with Kildare and Wicklow ETB, Educate Together opened another second-level school, Celbridge Community School, in 2015.
In England and Wales, a public school is a type of fee-charging private school originally for older boys. They are "public" in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession, nor are they run for the profit of a private owner.
William Thompson Kirkpatrick was an Irish teacher and grammar school headmaster. He is best known for having been the tutor of the two Lewis brothers from Belfast, Warnie Lewis and C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis, who would later become well known as a literary critic, novelist, and Christian apologist, lived as a resident pupil with Kirkpatrick from 1914-1917. In his autobiography, Lewis reports that he was significantly influenced by his tutor.
Edward Vaughan Boulger, generally known as Vaughan Boulger or E. V. Boulger, was an Irish academic whose career included Professor of Classics in the University of Adelaide. A Protestant by birth, he converted to Catholicism in his later years.
Thomas Edward Clouston was an Irish-born Presbyterian minister and academic in New South Wales.
St Ronan's College is a voluntary grammar school located in Lurgan, County Armagh, Northern Ireland.
Yeovil Grammar School was a grammar school in Yeovil, Somerset, which was founded or refounded about 1860 and closed in 1906 when its only headmaster, Henry Monk, retired.
