Abbey Christian Brothers' Grammar School

If your son is looking at grammar schools around Newry, Abbey is the boys' school most local families know. It is a Catholic voluntary grammar school for boys from eleven to eighteen, taking around 900 pupils, on a purpose-built campus off the Belfast Road on the northern edge of the town. It takes 133 boys into Year 8 each year, in five form classes. Entry is through the SEAG assessment.

The Christian Brothers came to Newry in 1851, two of them, and opened a school on Chapel Street. The Abbey name comes from the Cistercian abbey founded on the site by St Malachy in 1144. The school stayed on Courtenay Hill from the 1960s until January 2010, when it moved to the present campus, which has three full-size pitches including a floodlit synthetic one for Gaelic. The five junior form classes carry the names of the houses, Breffni, Donard, Iveagh, Oriel and Slemish, so a boy knows which house he is in from his first day, and the same five compete for the House Cup on sports day.

The day runs from nine to twenty past three, on ten short periods, with lunch split so that juniors and seniors eat in separate sittings while the other half of the school is in class. New boys are looked after carefully. There is a Mass for the year group in June before they start, the head meets each boy and his parents, and two senior pupils walk with every Year 8 class for its whole first week. First years are also let out of class a few minutes early for the first few days, so they are not caught in the crush for the canteen and the buses.