Cambridge House Grammar School

Cambridge House is a co-educational, non-denominational controlled grammar school on the Galgorm Road in Ballymena, with over 900 pupils from eleven to eighteen on a campus of nearly eighty acres. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

The school traces itself to 1910, when Jane Craig Currie and Sarah Kinnear opened Cambridge House School for girls. It grew from 113 pupils in 1930 to over 350 by 1963, at which point the governors handed it to the county education committee to pay for the expansion. It moved to the Galgorm Road site in 1973, and a separate boys' grammar school opened on the same campus the year after. The two ran side by side for nearly thirty years, sharing only a sixth form, until they amalgamated in 2001 into the school as it is now, with a new uniform, badge and motto. So the buildings your child would walk between were built for two schools rather than one.

The houses carry the names of people with real connections to the place and its subjects. Burnell is named after the astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Jones after the playwright Marie Jones, and Robinson after Brian Robinson, who was a pupil here before he played rugby for Ireland. The day starts at nine, which is later than most, and ends at twenty past three. For the junior years the fourth period is taught in two halves either side of lunch, so they eat earlier than the seniors. New pupils go into one of five form classes and stay with that group for their core subjects right through Key Stage 3.