Aquinas Diocesan Grammar School

Aquinas is a Catholic diocesan grammar school on the Ravenhill Road in south-east Belfast, co-educational, taking children from eleven to eighteen. It is one of the younger grammar schools in the city, and among the smaller ones, with five form classes in each year group. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

The school day is unusual and worth knowing before you plan your mornings. It starts at a quarter past nine, later than most Northern Ireland grammars, and ends at half past three, built from ten short periods of about thirty-five minutes. Lunch is not a break in the ordinary sense. It is three of those ten periods, and which one your child eats in depends on their year group. Years 8 and 9 eat from twenty to one until quarter past. Morning break is staggered the same way, with the younger years going first at twenty-five past ten and the older ones at twenty to eleven.

Assemblies are slotted into the same pattern, one year group at a time, each on its own day of the week. Year 8 assembles on Monday mornings, Year 9 on Tuesday, and so on through the week, always in the half hour when the other half of the school is at break. It is a small piece of scheduling, but it means a child in Year 8 is in a hall with their own year group rather than the whole school. The school describes itself as a community working towards "personal, spiritual and educational excellence", and says it wants pupils to feel valued for who they are. It suits a child who would rather be somewhere they are known by name.