Glenlola Collegiate

Glenlola Collegiate is a controlled grammar school for girls in the middle of Bangor, taking around a thousand girls from eleven to eighteen, with 164 places in Year 8, on a twelve acre site at Castle Park. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

The school came into being in 1957, when two Bangor girls' schools amalgamated: the Ladies Collegiate School and Glenlola, which had been founded by a Mrs Harte in the late 1890s. The present building opened in April 1963 on ground bought for twelve thousand pounds, and a second building went up in 2003 to bring everyone under one roof. For its 125th anniversary in 2023 the school went through its archive, put on an exhibition at North Down Museum and recorded interviews with former pupils and staff, which are still on its website.

The six houses are a map of North Down. Clanmorris, Dufferin, Hamilton and Ward carry the names of the families who held land around the town, and Harte and Weir are named for the two women who founded the schools that became Glenlola. How a girl is put into one is the part families remember: sisters go into the same house, and a girl is placed in her mother's house where possible, so a house can run through three generations of the same family. The house year is inverted, starting in June with Sports Day and finishing the following May. The day runs from a quarter to nine to a quarter past three, five hour-long periods on a fortnightly cycle. Girls are placed in one of six form classes and taught in that group for compulsory subjects through Years 8 to 10.