Omagh Academy Grammar School

Omagh Academy is a co-educational controlled grammar school on the Dublin Road in Omagh, with an approved enrolment of 660 and 95 places in Year 8. It is one of the smaller grammars, with twenty-eight form classes across the whole school. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

It started with a meeting. In December 1902 a group of local men gathered in the Grand Jury Rooms of Omagh Courthouse and decided the area needed a school, and it opened on 19 September 1903 with twenty-six names on the roll and five teachers, in a two-storey house on Market Street where the headmaster and his wife lived on the top floor. The Dublin Road building was opened in 1938 by the Duchess of Abercorn and shared with the technical school until 1967. The school has a habit of royal openings: the extension that nearly doubled it was opened by the Duchess of York in 1991, and the technology suite by the Duke of Abercorn on the same date in 2003.

The three houses are named after the rivers of the town, Strule, Drumragh and Camowen, the two smaller ones meeting in Omagh to make the third. Tuesdays are different: registration stretches to a longer session with the form teacher for personal development, so the morning periods are compressed before normal session times resume after lunch. Assemblies alternate by day and by age, so juniors and seniors are never in the hall together. New pupils get an induction evening in June, a games night in August and a trip in September, with Year 8 prefects assigned to them.