Strathearn School

Strathearn School is a girls' voluntary grammar school on the Belmont Road in east Belfast, with around 805 pupils drawn from across Belfast, North Down and the Ards Peninsula. It opened in 1929 with sixty-three pupils, founded by Victoria College as a junior school for the Belmont and Knock areas, and took boys as well as girls at the start, the boys leaving at eight. It became independent of Victoria College in 1988, with a board of governors of its own. The school counts its year groups as Form 1 to Form Upper 6 rather than Year 8 to Year 14. Entry is at Form 1 through the SEAG assessment.

The site was a private house before it was a school. Strathearn House was built in 1864 on eighteen acres at Belmont, and the grounds are still legible in the buildings. The canteen stands where the pond was, the sixth form centre corridor was the air raid shelters dug during the war, and the sixth form study room was an assembly hall put up in 1931. The school rebuilt on the same site in 2014 and the new building was opened the following February.

Two small things are worth knowing. The four houses, Barbour, Boucher, McCaughey and Watts, are named after four governors, and each of those governors bought the trophy his house still competes for. And when the school replaced the Victoria College uniform in 1950 with a green one of its own, it kept a wine stripe in the tie and the scarf to remember the founding school. Girls arrive into one of five unstreamed form classes of twenty-two, are taught in that group for their first three years, and are paired with sixth form mentors who visit the form class every week.