Performance charts are no help when choosing a school for your children
WE’RE IN A north city comprehensive school which has a certain notoriety because three out of four members of a particular music group went there. I am delighted with myself because I am putting the children’s names down for entry six years before the first one is due to start.
“I’m organised for a change,” I announce to the startled secretary as I hand over the enrolment forms.
“Did you bring copies of their birth certs?” she responds drily.
“Eh, no.”
“You’ll have to drop them in at some stage,” she says.
I’m already thinking ‘I have six years, I’ll be back some time in May 2014’. Then I spend a good five minutes wondering in the car what we’ll all look like in 2014, as the younger screams at me from the back seat to get moving because she has to get to the toilet because her poo is coming.
With any luck these conversations will have passed by then.
I don’t have any burning desire for them to go to this particular school, but it’s local and has a good reputation. One woman on our road sent her kids there and recommended it, saying that it had a place for every type of kid. I liked that line.
It performs reasonably well in the performance charts produced by a couple of papers every year but I don’t trust those things. Is it any coincidence that the majority of the “highest achieving” secondary schools are in the money belt of south county Dublin?
Are the teachers in these centres of excellence any better than their counterparts in Laois for example, or is every one of these already privately educated kids spending weekends and holidays holed up in the Institute of Education perfecting exam techniques.
But still, the league table gets into your brain and the old competitive instinct takes hold. Why should my kids not have the best of the opportunities available to them?
My old man is a big believer in the benefits of a private education. He got dragged up by the Patrician Brothers and succeeded in being the first of his family to be packed off to college, so his insistence that I be privately learned seems more based on aspirational hopefulness than reality.
In any case, my results served to make a mockery of his theory; at secondary level I excelled at under-achievement.
We have talked since about the value of where you go to school and seem to be at loggerheads. I’m inclined to believe that if the kid is happy, comfortable with their peers and engaged in extra-curricular activities then the inclination to study will follow.
He would agree generally with my hazy approach, but be more concerned about the academic programme.
And there’s the problem. Of all the things to have difficulty measuring in education, academic achievement is paradoxically the most difficult because, with the proliferation of grind schools, there is no way to know whether results are locally generated or paid for elsewhere.
You can look at a school and know if it has a history of sporting excellence, if it promotes the arts, if it is renowned for its contribution to the locality, but you can’t be sure if its academic standing is merited.
A bad teacher can be disguised by good results in his subject simply because all his students have to go elsewhere to be taught.
As a result the nightmare scenario may unfold. You pay through the nose to send your child to one of the leading schools, then pay double to ensure cosseted child gets into college by receiving the best grinds. Nobody – neither parent nor child – wants this.
Back up at the notorious comp, I’m eyeballing the kids for clues. They are predominantly of the hoody top, über-cool, iPod sounds at a moment’s silence variety, but they seem content enough in that depressed teenage way. A couple of them even nod hello as I pass – they must think I’m security.
The elder is agog. She wants to find the yard and is amazed that the kids are throwing their bags against the wall as they prepare to lounge for their lunch break. “I would put my bag in a locker inside where it’s safe and out of the way,” she intones as if auditioning for prefect.
One 16-year-old boy is serenading a blonde stunner with the old Extreme hit More Than Words, I presume ironically, due to irony being the order of the era and the song having always been pants. I like his style and it may be the decider in the school getting my vote.
abrophy@irish-times.ie