Bangor Grammar School

Bangor Grammar is a boys' grammar school on the Gransha Road in Bangor, taking boys from eleven to eighteen. It moved onto the present site in January 2013, after about eleven years of planning, from the College Avenue building it had occupied since the early twentieth century. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

The school opened in 1856 as the Bangor Endowed School, on the strength of a bequest from Robert Ward. The four houses come straight out of that founding story. Crosby is named after William Crosby, who emigrated to America in the 1850s, came back at the turn of the century and paid half the cost of the College Avenue building because he thought it a cause for humiliation that Bangor boys had to go to Belfast to finish their education. Dufferin is named after the Victorian diplomat, Ward after the man whose bequest started the school, and School House recalls the days when the school took boarders, when Room 104 in the old building was the dormitory. Houses hold their own assembly every second Friday, each in a different part of the building.

Periods are fifty-nine minutes long, which is the sort of detail that tells you the timetable was built carefully! The day runs from a quarter to nine to five to three, and lunch swaps by weekday, so the junior years eat early on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and late on the other three days, with the senior years doing the opposite. The canteen is called Bee Gee's. New boys come in for one morning in August before anyone else arrives, are walked to their form rooms by prefects, and are home by noon.