The House System
- A house system was introduced in 1919, whereby pupils were placed into one of four houses, named after the four provinces of Ireland, Ulster, Munster, Leinster or Connacht, irrespective of which part of Ireland they came from.
- Pupils in their first year at Portora entered Gloucester House, a separate preparatory department. Today, there is no separate prep school, however the name Gloucester House survives as the name of the Pastoral House for Year 8 pupils.
- The remainder of the school is divided into the four provincial houses.
However, Houses exist to facilitate a range of extra-curricular provision and the pastoral provision is horizontal with form tutors and Key Stage heads reporting to Vice Principal Student Support.
Read more about this topic: Portora Royal School
Famous quotes containing the words house and/or system:
“The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)