Campbell College

Campbell College is the one school of its kind among those using the SEAG assessment in Northern Ireland. It is an independent, fee-paying boys' school taking day boys and boarders from three to eighteen, on a hundred acres of wooded estate off the Belmont Road in east Belfast, beside Stormont. There are around 1,200 boys in total, and about 150 boarders from thirty countries. Day places at Year 8 are allocated through the SEAG assessment, so a boy sits the same test as at any grammar, but a family also pays fees.

It was founded in 1894 from the bequest of Henry James Campbell, a Belfast linen merchant, and the Victorian redbrick main building still sits at the centre of the site, with a lake and woodland around it. The motto is Ne Obliviscaris, lest we forget, and there are separate memorials in the Central Hall for both wars. C.S. Lewis was a pupil, though only for a couple of months, and the gas lamppost on the school drive is claimed as the one that appears in Narnia...a claim the school shares with at least two other places!

There are seven houses, named after former masters, and a boy stays in the same one for all seven years with the same tutor group. Brothers are put in the same house, and houses are allocated at a meeting in June before a boy starts. The pipe band was founded in 1909 and the school calls it one of the oldest active pipe bands in Ireland. The cadet force runs to around 350, and every boy does a compulsory year of it in Year 10 before choosing whether to carry on.