National schools, introduced across Ireland from 1831 onwards under the Board of National Education, were built in their hundreds throughout the nineteenth century, and many have since vanished or been converted beyond recognition. That a particular example here has been formally noted as a monument suggests it retains enough of its original fabric, or occupies enough of a distinct historical moment, to be considered more than simply an old building.

The Clontuskert area has a long and layered past. The nearby Clontuskert Priory, an Augustinian house founded in the medieval period, anchored the locality for centuries, and the broader parish carries traces of ecclesiastical and agricultural settlement reaching back well before the national school system arrived. When the Board of National Education began rolling out its programme of standardised schooling, the built results were often simple limestone or rubble-stone structures, functional and austere, designed to bring literacy and numeracy to rural children whose educational opportunities had previously been fragile and inconsistent. The school house at Crossconnell More would have sat within that same tradition, serving a scattered farming community in a part of Connacht where the land is low and wet and the townland boundaries are ancient.