Dalriada School

Dalriada is a co-educational, non-denominational voluntary grammar school on St James's Road in Ballymoney, taking around 900 pupils from eleven to eighteen, with 125 places in Year 8. It has been co-educational since it was founded, which is unusual for a school of its age. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

It opened in 1878 as Ballymoney Intermediate School and became Ballymoney High School in 1924. The name it has now came from a school play. G.E. Gordon, the English master who later became headmaster, wrote and produced a pageant called Dalriada, after the ancient kingdom of Dál Riata whose royal seat was at Dunseverick up the coast, and the school took the name from it. Gordon also started the tradition of an annual Shakespeare production and wrote the school song. The present building went up in 1937, with an extension in 2002 for languages, religious education and music.

Sport works across the school's own grounds and the town's. There are three rugby pitches, an all-weather hockey surface and a four hundred metre track on site, and PE regularly uses the pool and pitches at the Joey Dunlop Leisure Centre, named for the Ballymoney motorcyclist. There are inter-house competitions through the year. The school's own line on how it works is that pupils are "not just a number to us", and that the ethos rests on mutual respect between pupils and staff. One quirk worth knowing: the school's website still hosts a downloadable Minecraft world that pupils built to recreate the buildings, which tells you something about what gets encouraged there.