Read the list of former pupils and you have to do a double-take. Jonathan Rea, the Northern Irish rider who became the most successful Superbike World Champion in history. Gareth McAuley, the West Bromwich Albion centre-back who anchored Northern Ireland's defence at Euro 2016. Sir John Hermon, Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary during the worst of the Troubles. Trevor Ringland, British and Irish Lions winger. Claire Taggart, Paralympic boccia world champion. Emma McIlroy, founder of Wildfang. They all sat at the same desks in the same small grammar school in Larne, founded in 1886 with barely enough boys to keep the doors open.
When Sir Edward Coey and John Crawford opened the school in 1887 as an all-boys fee-paying boarding establishment, the prospects looked bleak. Mr R.M. Jones M.A. welcomed the first handful of pupils. For the next twenty years the school nearly closed several times. The combination of competition from established institutions in Belfast, the local economy of a working ferry port that did not particularly need a grammar education, and the sheer expense of fees and board kept enrolments down. The First World War forced the school to close entirely between 1914 and 1918. Then in 1922, in a move that probably saved the institution, Larne Grammar merged with Larne Girls' School and added a Preparatory Department. The school finally began to grow.
By the early 1970s the school had outgrown its Victorian footprint and an extension added nineteen new classrooms, a sports hall, and changing rooms behind the original building. In 1987, under Headmaster D.J. Thompson, the old school was demolished entirely and replaced with a modern building containing twenty-two classrooms, new sports facilities, staff offices, and a new canteen. The 1972 extension was kept and refurbished, and crucially the original assembly hall - the room every old pupil remembered - was preserved. Subsequent upgrades brought a Technology and Design Department in 2001 (the new building's solar panels power the entire school) and, for the 125th anniversary in 2011-12, a new astro-turf hockey pitch, four tennis courts, and a pavilion.
The school currently has around sixty teachers and just under eight hundred pupils, giving a pupil-teacher ratio of about 12.7 to one. That is well below the Northern Ireland average of 15.6 for grammar schools, which is itself comfortably below the UK overall average. Northern Ireland has long had the strongest GCSE and A-level grade distributions in the United Kingdom, and Larne Grammar consistently sits above the Northern Ireland average, which means it sits well above almost everywhere else. The school operates a selective intake, with multiple academic assessments to enrol. The combination of selection, small classes, and a long faculty tradition has produced the dense roster of distinguished alumni listed on the school's honours boards.
The roster is unusually long for a school this size. Sir John Hermon was Chief Constable of the RUC from 1980 to 1989, the years of the IRA hunger strikes and the Anglo-Irish Agreement. William Craig led the Vanguard movement in 1970s loyalist politics. Robert John Gregg, working from Larne to Vancouver, founded the academic study of Ulster-Scots dialects and became the great authority on Canadian English. Raymond Snoddy spent decades as one of Britain's leading media correspondents. Professor Sir Terence Stephenson chaired the UK's General Medical Council. From the sporting world, Jonathan Rea now has six Superbike world titles - he and Joey Dunlop give one small corner of north-east Northern Ireland the unlikely status of motorcycling's global capital. Ayeisha McFerran has been Ireland's first-choice hockey goalkeeper for years. Trevor Ringland played wing for the Lions in the 1980s. The list goes on for several screens.
On the field, the school punches above its weight too. The girls' hockey team won the Ulster Senior Schoolgirls' Cup in 2000, beating Ballymena Academy 2-1 in the final. In 2022, the 1st XI Hockey Team were crowned Super League Tier B Champions after beating Grosvenor Grammar School 3-0. The rugby 1st XV reached the Schools Trophy final three times in 2007 and 2008 and won twice. And in the summers of 2008 and 2009, the senior boys 4 x 100 metre relay team won the All Ireland Schools Athletics title back-to-back, becoming only the sixth school in the history of the competition to retain it. Their winning time in 2008 - 43.67 seconds - held off Castleknock College by less than a tenth. For a school of fewer than eight hundred pupils, that is a substantial collection of trophies.
Why does a small town grammar school of this size keep turning out world-level talent? Part of it is selective intake and small classes. Part of it is the cultural seriousness with which Northern Ireland has always treated education, a seriousness that survived the Troubles and now defines a society that produces lawyers, doctors, scientists, and athletes at rates well above its population share. And part of it is something harder to name - a culture in which a kid who turns out to be brilliant at racing motorcycles, or at goalkeeping, or at running 100 metres in just over ten seconds, gets noticed early, gets coached well, and gets sent on to bigger stages from the small assembly hall that the school had the sense to keep when it tore the rest of itself down.
Larne Grammar School sits at 54.853 N, 5.832 W in the town of Larne on the western shore of Larne Lough. Best viewed from 1,500 to 3,000 feet. From above, the school grounds and astro-turf pitches read as a green block on the northwestern edge of the town, with Larne Harbour to the east, the Antrim Hills rising west, and Islandmagee across the lough. Nearest airports: Belfast International (EGAA) about 16 nm southwest, Belfast City (EGAC) about 15 nm south. Prestwick (EGPK) on the Scottish coast is about 35 nm northeast.