A Message from the Principal

I am proud, as Principal of St. Kilian’s Community School, to welcome you to the school's website. I hope that the website will provide useful and current information for both current and prospective students and their families, for the staff of the school and for the wider community.

The school has played a vital role in the educational life of Bray and North Wicklow since 1981. Our school has grown and developed during these years, as has the local area of Ballywaltrim where we are based. Our motto “Learning for Excellence, for Life, for All” reflects our commitment to high standards, to the holistic development of our students and to the inclusive ethos of our school.

We offer a comprehensive curriculum, and are known for our strong emphasis on the pastoral care of the students in our care. We have a proud record of participation and success in a wide variety of sporting, musical and other activities. Our staff, both teaching and non-teaching, are hugely committed and hard-working. Our students do us proud in the manner in which they conduct themselves around the school, in their academic achievement and in how they represent and reflect on us in the wider community.

In 2016, through the Business in the Community programme, the school entered a partnership with Amgen, an American multinational biopharmaceutical company based in Dún Laoghaire. This has been a very exciting development for our school, one that our students have benefitted greatly from. We look forward to continue and strengthen our relationship with Amgen in the years ahead. St Kilian's is also linked with Elavon through Junior Achievers Ireland and, since 2021, has been one of the participating schools on the Power2Progress programme with UCD, an initiative funded by Zurich Ireland.

We take great pleasure in the many successes our past pupils have had in academic, sporting and other fields and value their continued links with the school. We are grateful to the many past pupils who so generously support our current students, through academic and careers mentoring. They provide great inspiration to our current students and to the staff of the school. We also place great importance on and value the positive relationships we share with our students’ parents and families and appreciate the important role they play in the life of the school.

St Kilian's has a very welcoming and inclusive ethos, and our student body reflects this. There are forty nationalities represented, reflecting the modern Ireland of 2023. We have been very proactive in enrolling Ukrainian students at St Kilian's, following the major upheaval in their own country, and they now number thirty among the student ranks. We celebrate this wonderful diversity in a hugely succesful Multicultural Day, every January.

In recent years there has been a significant investment in the school's ICT infrastructure, with fibre-optic cabling and an 'Enterprise Class', high-speed, WiFi system now in place. The two Graphics Rooms have had a total upgrade and the Computer Rooms have also been extensively modernised. Guidance and LCA rooms have been fitted with student workstations, with LCA students now having class sets of laptops.

I have been very proud to be a member of the staff of St. Kilian’s since 1985 and, was extremely honoured to be appointed as Principal in March 2012. I am hugely optimistic and positive about the future of our school and look forward with the newly-appointed Deputy Principal, Mr Enda Forde, to ensuring that the best possible education will always be available to our students. We are both committed to continued excellence across all aspects of the school, and to the further strengthening of the community values that the school is built upon.

John Murphy,

Principal.

September 2023.