St Joseph's Grammar School Donaghmore

St Joseph's in Donaghmore is a Catholic co-educational voluntary grammar school with 120 places in Year 8, and it is really two ways into one school. Seventy of those places go to the main school on the SEAG assessment. The other fifty go to Scoil Iósaef, the school's Irish Medium Stream, which is all-ability and does not use SEAG at all. Entry there depends on a child having had at least five of their seven primary years through Irish, including all of Key Stage 2.

The stream started in September 2010 with an intake of fifteen and now runs to around 280 pupils, roughly a third of the school. At Key Stage 3 half the curriculum is taught through Irish, pupils sit GCSE Irish at the end of Year 10, two years early, and then take the main school's full range of subjects at GCSE. Irish outside lessons is worked at rather than assumed: there is a pupil-run Coiste na Gaeilge, drama and debating clubs in Irish, weekly recognition for the most committed speaker and class, and a Gaeltacht trip to Donegal in Year 10.

The school was founded in 1922 by the Daughters of the Cross, a Belgian congregation whose first sisters had arrived two years earlier and run a hospital on the site. What they bought was the Lyle family's old manor house, which still sits at the top of the site as you come up from the Castlecaulfield Road. New pupils get a long run-in, from a registration evening and familiarisation day in June through a transition programme in August to staggered return dates in September, and there is a bus buddy as well as a peer buddy.