Lagan College is a very special school because it is integrated.
It was founded in 1981 so that boys and girls could be taught together. In our school you will meet pupils
of all abilities
from Catholic and Protestant backgrounds
from other faiths and cultures and
from no faith background.
We started off with just 28 students and for a while the teachers worked without pay! That is how committed they were to a shared future and how important they felt our school was to making our society a better place to grow up in, to learn and work in and ultimately to live together in. We are different because we believe that children who are different in all sorts of ways can be taught under the same roof and experience the richness of all traditions.
When the school first opened in 1981, Northern Ireland was being torn apart by violence. Some parents and teachers took a really brave decision and decided to bring children from divided communities together. Thankfully, Northern Ireland / North of Ireland is a much more peaceful place today. There have been great improvements but we still live in a divided society and there is still a great need to bring people together. In our school we believe that we can get to know one another and learn that we are not very different at all.
You are one of the lucky people to be a part of all of this. We hope that you will make a great effort to get to know people who are different from you and make lasting friendships here in Lagan College. You come to this school as an individual, with your own gifts, your own identity, perhaps your own religious or political views. It is important that you can be true to yourself and be proud of your identity, while at the same time being able to listen to others and learn from them.
We hope that here in Lagan, you will get many opportunities to integrate with others, get to know yourself better and see differences between people as exciting and interesting.
The founders of Lagan College had a vision of peace and unity for the people of Northern Ireland. That is why they chose a verse from the Bible to be the motto of the school: “Ut Sint Unum”, meaning “that all may be one”.