CAMPBELL COLLEGE near Stormont in leafy east Belfast has embarked on a campaign to entice boarders from the Republic.
Headmaster and former Eton teacher Jay Piggot and Gordon Hamilton, a former Irish rugby player who scored a famous try in the World Cup 20 years ago, are spearheading the attempt to lure students to cross the Border to study at the 117-year-old red-brick second-level college.
One of their main selling points is that its fees are keenly competitive compared to equivalent colleges in the South – in some cases thousands of euro cheaper.
Full-time boarding at Campbell is £10,951 (€12,566). This compares with annual fees of €16,800 at Clongowes Wood in Co Kildare and €17,500 at Blackrock College in Dublin.
Rockwell, though, in Co Tipperary, is marginally cheaper at €12,380 for full-time boarding, which indicates that fees cannot be the only selling point.
“In my time here from the mid-1970s there were 40 or 50 guys from the South and they brought an awful lot to the school; we want to see them coming back,” says Mr Hamilton.
His try against Australia at Lansdowne Road almost brought Ireland to the World Cup semi-finals in 1991 – until a last-ditch touchdown by the Wallabies’ Michael Lynagh spoiled the celebrations.
Samuel Beckett taught at Campbell for a period. CS Lewis was a student there for a while, and other alumni include the great Irish rugby back Mike Gibson, current international Paddy Wallace, members of the band Snow Patrol and businessman Tim Martin, who established the Wetherspoon chain of UK pubs.
The college, which stands on 100 acres, has 930 second-level students, of whom 119 are boarders. They are from a wide range of countries, but only two are from the Republic. Campbell hopes to increase its number of boarders to 200 in the next five years. Numbers from the South plummeted because of the Troubles.
The college, even with the recession, believes there is an opportunity to build up the body of Southern boarders. Southern students would take Northern Ireland exams such as GCSEs and A levels – roughly the equivalent of Junior and Leaving Cert exams. If they transferred North after Junior Cert, they would be obliged to sit one “acclimatisation” year to do GCSEs and then move on to the two-year A level programme.
Campbell College is an independent voluntary “B” school which means it must pay for its own facilities but the state pays teachers’ salaries.
Since Mr Piggot, who taught at Eton when the English princes William and Harry were pupils, took over as headmaster in 2006, the college has invested more than £10 million in new facilities and infrastructure.
As with many of its counterpart colleges in the Republic, rugby is a major feature at Campbell. It had 10 players on the Ulster schools team last season, five of them on the Ireland under-18 and under-19 teams. The college won the Ulster Schools Cup final on St Patrick’s Day, defeating old Belfast rivals Inst – a feat that Mr Hamilton and Mr Piggot also achieved as Campbell players in 1980. Mr Hamilton’s former Ireland-playing colleague, Brian Robinson, is head of physical education and rugby.
It will be curious to see what Southern parents think of the cadet training Campbell offers for the British army, navy and RAF through the British ministry of defence-supported Combined Cadet Force, and of the fact the college has a shooting range.
It’s just part of the diversity the college offers, says Mr Piggot.
Mr Hamilton, who runs the all-island company Hamilton Shipping, also believes in the diversity principle. As a juniors rugby coach at Belfast Harlequins Club, he played a significant part in developing a strong relationship with the local St Brigid’s GAA club.
Campbell has a perfect right to makes a pitch for pupils in the South, he says. “I get accused of being cheeky in business all the time, but competition is competition. Parents continue to have choice and we want to give parents in the South the option of coming North for what we would argue is at least as good an education in terms of total curriculum – but a good deal cheaper.”
