Sacred Heart Grammar School

If your daughter is preparing for a grammar place in Newry, Sacred Heart is a girls' school with a long memory and a clear sense of what it is. It is a Catholic grammar school founded in 1930 by the Sisters of St Clare, taking girls from eleven to eighteen on a seventeen acre site on Ashgrove Avenue, on the northern edge of the town. The school puts its roll at around 850. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

Sacred Heart spent its first fifty-five years beside the Poor Clare Convent on Castle Street, in the middle of Newry, and by the time it left in 1985 it was teaching across the six original classrooms and a further thirty-two mobiles. The present site looks east to the Mourne Mountains and has a driving range on it. Musicals have run here since 1956, every other year in the autumn term, and the school keeps the full list going back to the first one, Amos. The Gondoliers has been staged twice, in 1964 and again in 1984.

Breakfast is served in the dining hall from 8.15 am, forty minutes before registration, and the day ends at 3.20 pm. Every class from Year 8 to Year 14 has a form teacher who meets them daily, and the school says particular attention goes to Year 8 pupils settling in. Its line to parents is that "from the moment they enter our gates in Year 8, their welfare is our primary concern". It suits a girl who wants a settled school where she will be known by name, and who will get something out of a place that still expects at least half the school to be in the musical!