A grammar school has existed in Ramsey since 1681. The institution shifted between premises for nearly two and a half centuries until 1933, when it moved to its present site on Lezayre Road, into a building that still forms the east wing of the modern school. Then in 1940 the Second World War interrupted everything. The school was decommissioned and requisitioned by the military, and the children were taught somewhere else for six years. When peace came in 1946 the school reopened, but not in the form anyone remembered. It opened as a non-selective, coeducational comprehensive - the first in the British Isles to take all comers across the full ability range. The grammar in its name became history, not policy. Today over 1,000 pupils attend, taught by about 140 teaching and support staff.

While the children were elsewhere, the building was at war. The Air Ministry requisitioned it in 1940. When RAF Andreas opened as a fighter station in 1941, the school's classrooms became its Operations Room. Plotters - mostly young women of the WAAF - stood around a great map table moving counters across the Irish Sea as wireless operators in another part of the building tracked the German aircraft trying to bomb Belfast and Liverpool. The Operations Controller would scramble fighters from Andreas and Jurby to meet them. After Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 the Luftwaffe shifted east, RAF Andreas became a training base, and the Operations Room was redundant - until somebody worked out that with ten RAF training stations operating around the Irish Sea, somebody had to talk to all those student navigators in the air. In March 1943 a unit unique in the entire RAF was set up at the school: the Training Flying Control Centre, headed by Wing Commander Bullimore. At its peak the TFCC was responsible for the safety of training aircraft from ten separate stations - sometimes more than 200 aircraft in the air at once, each with an average crew of five. A thousand lives at a time. The classrooms were divided into a Signals Interception Room, a Navigation Room and an Operations Room, all staffed by WAAFs and airmen. It stood down at the end of the war.

Today the campus is four buildings: East, West, PE-and-games, and South, with the West and South linked by a two-storey corridor. A North building, formerly the Auldyn Infants School, was used briefly during construction work and then demolished to make way for Scoill Ree Gorree, the town's junior school. The South building cost 6.5 million pounds and opened in September 2007. It houses Special Needs, Design and Technology, an open-plan Art studio, Drama studios, new English rooms, and rooms for Economics, Business, Politics and Rural and Agricultural Science. The agriculture programme comes with its own teaching piggery, with room for fourteen piglets - the kind of detail you only get in a rural school on an island. The Sixth Form Centre has a 122-seat lecture theatre. The Sports Hall has been re-roofed and modernised, and the all-weather floodlit astroturf was resurfaced in 2011.

The roll of former pupils is a snapshot of the small island's public life. Politicians: Allan Bell, Alan Crowe, Norman Radcliffe, Percy Radcliffe, Eddie Teare. The historian Constance Radcliffe, who received the Reih Bleeaney Vanannan for her work on Manx culture. Thomas Kneen, who became Clerk of the Rolls. Andrew Williamson, deputy deemster. The rugby player G.A.M. Isherwood. And then the people whose names travel further: David Knight, world champion enduro motorcycle rider, who tore up tracks across Europe; Conor Cummins, one of the Isle of Man TT's most respected riders; and Beckii Cruel, the singer and entertainer who became, briefly, a sensation in Japan. On a small island, the school you go to is often most of the people you ever know. The classrooms on Lezayre Road have shaped much of what 21st-century Ramsey thinks and votes and races and sings.