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School Ethos & Vision

Bangor Grammar School is a local school, which serves its local community. It draws from a limited number of primary schools (about 36 in all), whom it knows well and with whom it sustains close links. Its situation close to the heart of the town of Bangor reinforces this strong sense of local identity. The School is proud of its ethos as a voluntary grammar school providing an academic curriculum and fostering a range of skills, talents and enthusiasms within its extensive extra-curricular provision; it maintains close links with other post-primary schools and institutions, particularly Glenlola Collegiate, with whom it shares activities in the CCF, Scripture Union and extra-curricular drama, and the North Down and Ards Institute for Further Education, with whom it works closely to provide a wider sixth form curriculum.

However, the state of its facilities, the limitations of its site, its location within a highly residential community and the distance from its own playing fields has led it, after close consultation with the Department of Education, to the conclusion that, to ensure its development and its ability to provide an education fit for purpose in the twenty first century, a move to a new, purpose-built school on a new site, big enough to allow for the provision of both recreational space and curricular and extra-curricular games space, is essential. In March 2006, the Department of Education announced that funding was available to allow a new Bangor Grammar school to be built on a new site, designated as the present Clanmorris campus of Bangor Academy and Sixth Form College on the Gransha Road. In June, it was confirmed that the procurement route would be conventional ‘Design and Build’.

The new building needs to accommodate and facilitate the radical changes which are likely to occur within the next five years and beyond. It also wants to reflect the long and proud tradition of the school and its connections with the community of Bangor. It is hoped that the design of the building will ‘quote’ from its existing buildings and in some way commemorate its past. Aware of its place within Bangor, it is intended that the building should have a civic impact and be something in which the whole community may take pride.

Its local nature perhaps carries with it some risk of falling rolls within the context of the general demographic downturn. So far, however, its intake has not suffered noticeably and within the North Down Borough area, its long-term projection remains healthy. The LTE number is set, for the moment, at 850 in the grammar school, and the school is optimistic that it can sustain that number or even increase it. A major challenge for the school will be to hold the trust of the community so that it remains a first choice school for a very significant number of post-primary boys within the borough.

Bangor Grammar School recognises that the educational and political future of Northern Ireland is uncertain. In this context of uncertainty, the school remains concerned that its academic ethos could be weakened. Nevertheless, it is looking positively at the requirements of the new curriculums, and the increased flexibility they offer, and is actively examining ways of making its curricular provision sensitive to the needs and abilities of its pupils now and in the future.

Bangor Grammar School is an all-boys school and is proud of that tradition, which it seeks to maintain. The school will be sensitive, however, to the need to adapt in appropriate ways to changing demands and needs within a developing educational context.