Victoria College, Belfast

Victoria College is a non-denominational girls' grammar school in south Belfast, with over 900 pupils in the secondary school and a preparatory department and pre-school alongside it, taking 135 into Year 8 each year. It was founded in 1859 as the Ladies' Collegiate School by Margaret Byers, one of the pioneers of girls' education in Ireland, and was renamed by royal command in 1888, Queen Victoria's jubilee year. Entry is at Year 8 through the SEAG assessment.

It runs on two campuses a few streets apart in Marlborough Park. Years 8 and 9 are at Richmond, the junior campus near the Malone Road, and move up to Cranmore, off the Lisburn Road, from Year 10. The school has a long-term plan to bring everything onto the Cranmore site. Its first purpose-built home, put up in 1873 on the corner of University Road, is now the Crescent Arts Centre.

The day runs from ten to nine until ten past three, on a ten-day timetable with six fifty-minute periods. There are five houses, Wellington, Crescent, Howard, Marlborough and Richmond, and a girl's form class is named after her house, so the two are the same thing. Latin is on the Year 8 timetable alongside French and Spanish. In January 2025 the school became the first post-primary in Northern Ireland to use Yondr pouches: phones, smartwatches and earbuds go into a pouch that locks magnetically for the school day, and teachers hold the magnets so a device can be opened when a lesson needs it. Year 13 peer mentors are trained for the job and work with the younger girls on the Richmond campus.