St. Mary's Grammar School

St Mary's Grammar School is a co-educational Catholic voluntary grammar school in Magherafelt, and it draws from three counties, Derry, Tyrone and Antrim. It has 1,109 pupils and is oversubscribed. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

It was founded in 1927 by Monsignor John Ward, the parish priest, under the direction of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Bordeaux, to give the Catholic girls of the area a secondary education. The school records how it started with a precision most schools would round off: for the first month there was exactly one pupil, Mollie Devane, and ten girls were enrolled by the end of the first year. Boys were admitted from September 1978. A six million pound extension was opened by Cardinal Daly in 1994, paid for by a fundraising body the school set up a decade earlier, and the newest buildings went up in 2017 for the school's ninetieth year. The canteen is called Cafe Bordeaux, after the founding order.

The day runs from nine to twenty to four, six periods of fifty minutes, with a second registration in the afternoon and lunch split so that Key Stage 3 eats before the older years. The settling-in programme for Year 8 is one of the most concrete published anywhere: staff visit the primary schools, there is a taster afternoon, an induction evening in June for parents to meet the Year 8 pastoral team, familiarisation and icebreaker days in August, a teambuilding day in September, a GAA class league run through the first few months, and a review meeting with the form teacher before the first half-term is out.