Our Lady's Grammar School

Our Lady's Grammar School is a Catholic grammar school for girls on Chequer Hill in Newry, taking girls from eleven to eighteen, with somewhere around 950 pupils. Its Year 8 runs as four form classes. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

It opened on 21 November 1887, when nine girls began their education in a room in the Convent of Mercy in Newry. It was founded by the Sisters of Mercy, at the request of the Bishop of Dromore, as a school of higher education for the Catholic girls of the town, and the founding date is still marked every year with a Mass and concert on 21 November. The school took boarders from 1918 until 1971. It spent nearly a century on Canal Street before moving to the present site in 1992, and the newer buildings there carry the names of the order and its founder. Its motto is Ora et Labora, pray and work, and the school year opens with a Mass on 24 September, the feast of Our Lady of Mercy.

The timetable runs on a fortnightly basis, with five classes of an hour a day, and the school is direct with new families that it expects an hour and a half to two hours of homework a night from Year 8. There are no houses. Induction happens at the end of June: girls come in to meet their form teacher and their year head, find out at ten o'clock which class they are in, spend the morning with their form and their induction booklet, and finish with a barbecue in the school's own restaurant, the Four Arches.