The Irish Independent (registration required) reports a growth in fee paying schools in the Dublin area, along with a drop in numbers attending free schools.
The great social divide in Irish education is revealed in new figures today.
They show how fee-paying schools in the Dublin area are booming while the majority of Free Education schools are facing massive declines in enrolment.
One-in-three pupils attending a voluntary secondary school is now paying fees of up to €4,000 and more per year, compared with one-in-four two decades ago.
. . .
One result is that there are anything up to 20,000 empty desks across all Free Education second level schools in the Dublin area while fee-paying schools are turning applicants away in record numbers.
It would be nice if the story mentioned where the figures came from, but never mind. More interesting to me is that paper dug up this:
Prominent educationist Prof Kathleen Lynch from UCD suggested that "anxious middle class parents" were taken in by much of the hype about fee paying schools and their supposed advantages which was believed without any empirical evidence.
She claimed some of the fee-paying schools used "discreet selection" to keep out pupils they did not want such as those with dyslexia. Prof Lynch, Director of the Equality Centre at UCD cited the example of one prominent south side fee-paying school that contacted a free education school asking it to take in a particular applicant "who is not our type of girl".
Leave aside all the academic stuff about whole utterly awful academic sorting is. (I decline to be snarky and point out that Lynch teaches at a university that engages in selective admissions.) I will settle for pointing out why I am saving money for a fee paying school. Friends of mine came to Ireland to flee the violence in South Africa. They put their two children in the standard free schools. Their primary school aged daughter, an outgoing sort, suddenly stopped talking and got withdrawn. Their secondary school aged son, a bright but shy sort, eventually came home one day humiliated. They had traded essays they had written, and were supposed to comment on them. He made a remark about the use of an adjective, and quickly discovered that not only did none of his fellow students know what an adjective is, neither did his teacher. That was enough. My friends switched their children to a fee paying school, and their children are blossoming.
UPDATE: Dick O'Brien at Back Seat Drivers tells us that Irish schools are good, because they are better than the government schools provided in most other countries. In other words, I should be happy with the bad service I have gotten from Ireland's mediocre state airline, Aer Lingus, because, heck, it is way better than SABENA, the Belgian state airline so bad it was dubbed S(uch) A B(ad) E(xperience) N(ever) A(gain).
