Slemish College

Slemish College is a grant maintained integrated school on the Larne Road in Ballymena, co-educational, taking children from eleven to eighteen, with 140 places in Year 8. It is not a grammar school, and that changes how you prepare. Thirty-five per cent of the Year 8 places go on the SEAG assessment and the other sixty-five per cent are allocated with no reference to it, and anyone not placed by the first route is automatically considered under the second.

It opened in September 1996 with eighty-four students, as mid Antrim's first planned integrated post-primary school. The founding is worth knowing because the school still trades on it: approval depended on recruiting eighty pupils, staff meetings were held in teachers' houses, and the school says that scramble set an attitude that has stuck. Seamus Heaney wrote to the college when it opened, and the letter is still in the prospectus. "Slemish is our holy mountain," he wrote. "But even as a natural feature, it radiates positive force: the very look of it makes the heart lift."

The six houses are named after Celtic saints, Comgall, Gall, Lorcan, Ultan, Faber and Beryan, a child is put into one in Year 8 and keeps it, and the house is worn as a tie every day. The college calls itself three schools in one, junior, senior and upper, each with its own head. The day runs from nine to twenty past three on a fortnightly timetable, and the shape of it is unusual: break and lunch happen inside long double periods at different times depending on your year group, and there is a second registration in the middle of the afternoon.