Gort Community School

Striving for Holistic Health for All by ‘Strength in Unity’

Gort Community School is a co-educational school found in the rural town of Gort, County Galway in the West of Ireland with a population of 1,000 students, teachers, and support staff. As a health supporting school, Gort CS has been recognised on the national arena as ‘excellent’ in different areas; from human rights to environmental action; project management to entrepreneurship, creative thinking to artistic musical endeavours; digital learning to student leadership, holistic health, sport & wellbeing.

On entering Gort Community School, a stained-glass window crafted by students, celebrating diversity and inclusion welcomes visitors. Students thrive as they are recognized and supported as key stakeholders and agents of change.

For the past 27 years, Gort CS has harnessed close links with local business and community services, CSO’s and NGO’s, who value the outsider, the ‘others’, for the wisdom they may imbue. Believing in strength in community, they have sought connections as far away as North Ethiopia, Malawi, Nepal, Finland, and the Silicon Valley. With a game changing, inclusive and creative approach to health as a human right, Gort Community School has been more recently recognised with several titles and awards.

Gort Community School nurtures the ‘Meitheal’ approach (neighbours helping neighbours) akin to Ubuntu’. Emerging student leaders guide younger peers in the transition to experience the ethos and values of the school from the first day by ‘thinking local, acting global’. In this way, the expectation of ‘leadership, belonging and belief’ is passed on from one year to the next.

Initiatives that complement the academic classroom practices, programmes, and pedagogy are the ‘fertile ground’ on which a ‘healthier lived school experience’ shoots out strong roots. With a sense of fun, a community element, and a recognition that fitness is not just for academics or elite athletes, the focus is simple; “Minding the body, Minds the mind”.

After all, the school crest “Ní neart go cur le cheile,” fosters the belief that “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link”.