Irish Election are pleased to announce our collection of Irish 
Fee-paying schools.
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So the idiotic debate on College entry from Private “grind School” roles on again.
MONEY still talks when it comes to going to university, the 2007 college entry figures confirm.Grind and fee-paying schools continue to dominate the tables of feeder schools for a number of leading third-level institutions.
I have said this before and I will say it again. The reason that these schools dominate these tables is mainly because if someone goes to a grind school they are not being sent their to do an apprenticeship, they are going there to go to college. Hence they have large college attendances as most if not all want to go to college. Compare that to a normal school, like the ones most of us probably went to you had some people wanting to go to college, some to work and some to do trades. Hence why College attendance is lower as a percentage of the entire student body.
However, the prominence of the fee-paying sector will reignite debate about education equity and how wealthier parents can buy advantage by selecting schools with more resources.
Whether or not parents buy advantage for their children maybe a debate, but this certainly does not show that. What it does show is that aspirations matter.
But who do the aspirations belong to?
There are many reasons why these schools send more kids to third level, but it’d be crazy to suggest that by sending a student to one of these schools, parents were not giving them some sort of advantage over their peers.
These schools pay for better facilities and better teachers. The fees they charge effectively bar students from the lower social classes from attending the schools which has the effect of creating a student population with a lower incidence of the behavioural problems associated with poverty.
Students who attend these schools get a better education than the rest of us, and that’d be fine, except that they get this education at our expense. If they didn’t exist, then we’d have better teachers in the public system. If these schools didn’t exist, then the proportion of pupils with behavioural problems in the public student population would be lower, which would have a beneficial effect at the classroom level.
The proportion of students in these schools is tiny compared to the rest of the population and geographical come from certain areas eg D4. So the abolition of these schools would have very little effect.
From what I can deduce, Simon, that last point argues that teachers are not being taken from the rest of us in any affecting manner, because geographically, the teachers being taken are from these certain areas. But that’s not true. The teachers who work in such schools are not necessarily from certain areas. I did a few grinds in the Institute: only one of the teachers I came across was from Dublin (and even still, he was from North Dublin).
Having said that, I agree with your point in general, though I’d nuance mine a little. Aspiration is a huge factor. (Of the parents, mind; no child who truly wants to go to Trinity and truly wants to study Law needs any special tutoring for the Leaving Cert.) So, too, is pressure - and from the parents, again, not the teachers. Because the LC is essentially a long memory test, no class can equip a student for an exam. The real work is done at home, keeling over a desk, writing and rewriting the same notes until the wrist can take no more. And it’s parents who have-paid-good-money-for-your-grades-Timmy who manage most effectively to cuff their kids to their desks in the evening.
No that point was answering
On the teachers issue. True they might have the best teachers. But split the schools up and I doubt every school could get even one of the newly released teachers.