Measuring the best Secondary Schools
It’s important that we know which schools are the best in the country. It’s even more important locally. Parents faced with the choice of multiple schools in their area should not have to rely on anecdotal evidence of where to send their child for the 6 most important years of their upbringing.
Factual evidence and statistics should properly rank these schools and they should be made available to everyone.
Feeder Schools list?
Up to now all Secondary Schools have been measured based on the % of students that the school in question sends to third level education. There are so many flaws with this system and even though my own school made the top ten list this year, it’s still an unfair way of measuring performance of teachers and pupils.
In school (A), all the students go to third level but they’ve all received no more than 300 points and they go to do level 6 courses. School (B) has bright and intelligent students however a large group of lads go abroad to find work and another group of girls take a year off for “self discovery”. The rest of its students all score over 400 points and they go to third level.
You would assume that in any case School (B) would have a higher rank due to its higher achieving students. Instead School (A) tops the league with 100% and School (B) sits at 80%.
This system is fundamentally flawed
It’s also flawed when it’s measured by the % of students going on to “University”. Under the Universities Act 1997 only the following 7 institutions are recognised as a university
- Dublin City University
- University College Cork
- University College Dublin
- National University of Ireland, Galway
- National University of Ireland, Maynooth
- University of Limerick
- Trinity College, Dublin
It’s amazing that a law has enshrined a select few colleges as better than any Institute of Technology or any other college.
The Sunday Times today released their list of feeder schools and it ranks the schools by the % of students in “University”. My school, which was in the top ten based on third level is ranked 137th due to this manipulation of figures. What a stupid system!!
The ST didn’t even get my schools figures right. As I said, we made the Irish Times top ten with 100% going to third level. However the ST says that we only sent 95% of our students. It seems to have left out any students who went abroad, further than the British Isles.
I don’t care where graduates go, it’s still 3rd level education!!
What we need is to measure schools by the average number of points the students get. That would make much more sense. It has its flaws too, but it’s a much better system than what we have at present.
What we shouldn’t do is measure by socio-economic background as this recent list tried to do. High School Rathgar came out on top when they took into account the number of Immigrants in the locality, the unemployment rate and the rate of previous participation in third level education.
Immigrants?? What have they to do with this???????
I know people from Knocklyon who go there and they travel 20 minutes by bus. Measuring the locality of the school tells you nothing when students come from all over the city.
If parents didn’t go to third level then it’s not the case that their kids won’t either! Both my parents have little or no 3rd level education, yet my Dad is a successful manager and my Mom is a fantastic house wife, and she runs music classes part time.
Also I need to point out that my school is much better than most, and it’s a public school. Looks like all you posh South Dubliners spent your money on status rather than on education!! 