Friends' School Lisburn

Friends' School Lisburn is the only Quaker school in Northern Ireland, a co-educational voluntary grammar school on Prospect Hill in the middle of Lisburn, with around a thousand pupils from eleven to eighteen and a preparatory department below that. It takes 169 into Year 8 and entry is through the SEAG assessment.

It was founded in 1774 by the Religious Society of Friends, on the back of a bequest from a linen merchant, and has been on the same hill ever since. It taught boys and girls together from the start, which was unusual for the time and came out of the Quaker view on equality rather than any later decision. The Quaker foundation is still audible rather than just historical: assemblies include a period of silent worship, and the school keeps links with the seven other Quaker schools in Britain and Ireland. Its 250th anniversary in 2024 left two things on the ground, an outdoor performance space called the 1774 Pavilion and a fifteen hundred metre trail round the edge of the grounds. The oldest building, Middle House, dates from 1880 and is listed.

Registration groups here are called Collects, not forms, and a pupil stays in the same one from Year 8 to Year 14. Year 8s are taught in their Collect for everything but practical subjects, and senior prefects are assigned to each Collect and turn up four mornings a week for the whole year. The week runs on forty-five periods of thirty-five minutes. Mondays to Thursdays run from a quarter to nine until half three, and Fridays start five minutes later and finish half an hour earlier. It suits a child who will settle into one group and stay there.