See photos as Arklow’s Glenart College celebrate bumper open evening

As the largest post-primary school in Arklow, there was plenty of demand to get a first-hand experience of the range of facilities, subjects and extra-curricular activities on offer, with students from 18 different primary schools in attendance.

Members of the public were given tours of the school building, conducted by a team of student ambassadors, while every subject area and extra-curricular area had student representatives demonstrating and speaking about their own areas of interest.

There were several addresses on the evening, with sixth-year students Tom Byrne and Jessica Doyle, the school's Head Boy and Head Girl, both reflecting on their time in the school, while Aaron Murray and Caoimhe O'Reilly-Hughes both spoke about their experiences so far in first year.

The school also acknowledged their top three achievers in Leaving Certificate 2024, including Aaron Geraghty, who is studying a Bachelor of Education in French and Italian at UCD and received a gift from Principal Damien Cloney, with Rusne Jokuzyte and Sofiia Ivanycheva unable to attend due to university commitments.

In his address, Principal Cloney spoke of the school's long co-educational tradition in Arklow, since the school's formation in 1905.

Mr Cloney's address also focused on the five core values of an Education and Training Board (ETB) school: excellence in education, care, respect, equality and community and how these values impact the day-to-day life of the school.

He also pointed to the school's diverse curriculum, being the only post-primary school in Arklow to offer subjects like engineering, artistic performance, coding, digital media literacy, philosophy and

computer science, as well as pointing to the fact that Glenart College will be one of only 57 schools in Ireland to be offering the new Leaving Certificate Drama, Film and Theatre Studies subject from September 2025.

The school also launched its new school prospectus, which all families received on arrival, with primary school students in attendance also taking part in an open evening scavenger hunt quiz, whereby they had to find clues to a series of questions about Glenart College.

Reflecting on the success of the event, Deputy Principal Joe Rolston said: "We were delighted with the big numbers in attendance and the engagement from our prospective students and families.

"Our students did a superb job in promoting our school and the level of preparation that our staff put into the Open Evening was there for all to see. The enthusiasm towards our school, that we witnessed on our visits to the primary schools, was mirrored on the evening.

"This has also been reflected in the level of enrolment applications that we have received so far."