Ysgol Rhiwabon was created in 1967, when the abolition of the 11-plus examination led Denbighshire's education committee to merge Ruabon Grammar School and Ruabon Grammar School for Girls into a single mixed 11–16 comprehensive with a sixth form. The change swept away the selective grammar-school system across much of Wales, and Ruabon's near-four-century-old educational tradition, traced back to the 1570s, continued in a new institutional form rather than ending outright.
Ysgol Rhiwabon draws pupils not just from Ruabon itself but from surrounding communities including Acrefair and Cefn Mawr, reflecting the same wider catchment that the old grammar schools served in their day. It operates today as a Welsh-medium and bilingual comprehensive, part of the modern Wrexham County Borough education system.
The school has continued to mark its long institutional history rather than let it lapse, including preserving Eisteddfod traditions — a distinctively Welsh competitive festival of music, poetry and performance — as part of school life, a thread of cultural continuity stretching back through the grammar-school era to the parish's older Welsh-language traditions.
Ysgol Rhiwabon is a working secondary school and, like any school, is not open to casual visitors during term time. For the historic building that housed its predecessor institution, see the Old Grammar School on Church Street, viewable from St Mary's churchyard.
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