Principal's Welcome

Welcome to Cork Educate Together Secondary School, the first school of its kind outside the Greater Dublin area.

CETSS, which opens in August 2016, will be fully resourced by the Department of Education and Skills and will be a 21st century school. This website has been designed to explain how the school will be a significant and long-awaited development in the educational history of the Cork region. Like all Educate Together schools, the culture of the school will be based on four pillars

• Co-educational
• Multi-denominational & equality-based
• Democratic
• Student-centred

Our school is an alternative, grounded not in only in the richness of Irish society and culture, but also in the insights of the best contemporary educational systems world-wide. As such, CETSS will be technology-based, virtually text-book free, genuinely academic by emphasising critical-thinking, as well as being a leader in the promotion of ethical and development education, collaborative-learning, inter-disciplinary learning and the student voice. We believe that both the insistence on student conformity and unbalanced, rote-learning led curricula are both harmful to young people's personal and academic development, and furthermore, we believe that there is a better way. In short, we will offer students problems to solve instead of solutions to learn off. CETSS will open in temporary accommodation in August 2016 and will soon be located in a new building in the Douglas/Rochestown area. A campaign to open a second ET secondary in the city centre is well under way and has gathered 600+ signatures to date. With Educate Together as a member or affiliated of national schools in Grattan Street, Carrigaline, Rochestown, Midleton and Mayfield; and already significant interest being expressed from students from many other primaries, we believe that the need for this school is fully justified. Enrolment for 2017 is now open and updates can be found both on this site and on Twitter and Facebook.

Colm O'Connor, Principal.