Assumption Grammar School

If you are looking at girls' grammar schools in County Down, Assumption is the one in Ballynahinch, on the Belfast Road. It is a Catholic school for girls from eleven to eighteen, with an enrolment of 910 and 130 places in Year 8, and it calls itself a specialist school for music and physical education. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

The school opened on 8 September 1933 with twenty-eight pupils, founded by the Missionary Sisters of the Assumption. Its first principal was Mother Baptist McKenny, a local woman. Sisters of the order led the school for its first sixty-seven years, until a lay principal took over in 2000. The present building was opened in May 2012 by a sister of the founding order, and holds two halls, a library, drama and music suites, and a dining room the school calls the Windmill Restaurant. Outside there are Gaelic football and camogie pitches and an astro-turf.

The school carries two mottoes at once. The crest reads Ex Sola Virtute Honor, from virtue alone comes honour, and a girl will wear that on her blazer. Day to day the school uses a different phrase, Fully Alive, and says it is "embedded in every aspect of school life". New pupils come in during June, before the summer, to meet their form teacher and their class, and the school is direct that prefects rather than staff do most of the settling in, walking first years through bus routes and the dining hall. Year 8 is treated as a transition year in its own right, with road safety, study skills and mental health sessions run across it. It suits a girl who will take up what is offered.