Sir, – Your Editorial “Teaching time at primary level” (December 14th) echoes Ruairí Quinn’s misguided supposition that the amount of time allocated to religion in our primary phase of education somehow influences the mediocre performance in mathematics and science.
If Mr Quinn’s contention is correct then how does he explain the better results in Northern Ireland’s Catholic primary schools, which give the same proportion of time to religion? How would he explain the fact that England’s Catholic primary schools with their equal commitment to religious education generally outperform their secular school counterparts as seen in local and nationally produced school performance tables?
Incidentally, these performance tables take into account socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds of pupils within each school and local authority area.
Perhaps it might be better to ask questions about the length of the teaching day and the number of teaching days in the year. We might also look at the quality and rigour of monitoring of pupil progress and of teacher performance. – Yours, etc,