Royal School Dungannon

The Royal School Dungannon is a co-educational voluntary grammar school on the Ranfurly Road in Dungannon, taking pupils from eleven upwards, with a hundred places in Year 8. It boards as well as taking day pupils, in two houses, one for boys and one for girls, both in the middle of the school. Day places go through the SEAG assessment. A small number of boarding places are decided separately and do not require the test.

Its charter came from James I in 1608 and the school itself was established in 1614, at Mountjoy near Lough Neagh, as one of the free schools of the Plantation. It became co-educational in 1986 on amalgamation with Dungannon High School for Girls, and took the motto Perseverando then. The main building dates from 1789 and is known as the Old Grey Mother, a nickname it picked up after a nineteenth century cement rendering covered its red sandstone.

The four houses are named after people tied to the school's own story rather than to the county. Bullingbrook was the first headmaster, appointed in 1614, who died with his son fleeing rebels in 1641. Nicholson was a pupil who became a general and died at the siege of Delhi in 1857; his statue was brought back from Delhi and put up at the school in 1960. Beresford was an archbishop who paid for buildings in 1850, and Mountjoy was the commander whose campaign made the plantation possible. One tradition worth knowing about: two Year 14 pupils a year go to New Zealand for a year on the school's Dilworth Scholarships. The day runs from a quarter to nine to twenty-five to four.