Madam, – The latest league tables compiled by Prof Vani Borooah (Home News, August 6th) assess school performance by the number of students progressing to third level. While claiming to allow for socio-economic circumstances he appears to discriminate geographically against schools.
It is difficult to understand why the study awards three points for students entering TCD and UCD and only two points for other universities. A significant number of our students enrol each year in NUI Maynooth, the closest university to Lucan. NUI Maynooth has an excellent academic record and works hard to develop close links with nearby schools. It is surely deserving of equal treatment with other universities.
League tables do little to support the work of schools who attempt to meet the needs of all students from the local community regardless of academic ability or socio economic background. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – As one of the authors of the school league table may I clarify some of the points regarding it? It is true, indeed a truism, that proceeding to third-level education should not be the sole purpose of a good school education. Nonetheless, many feeder schools wear such success as a badge of honour and we set out to judge them on these terms.
On this criterion, the usual way of evaluating schools is to simply look at the proportion going into tertiary education – on this measure several schools scored 100 per cent. So, we wanted a sharper means of discriminating between schools. Since both TCD and UCD appear in the list of the world’s top 100 universities – an honour denied to several UK universities and to other universities in Ireland – we thought it reasonable to give them a higher weight. Admittedly, the weighting is slightly arbitrary – another person could have assigned different weights – though our methodology is flexible enough to accommodate alternative views.
I should emphasise that we didn’t know the subjects that school leavers were going to study at third level, just where they were going to study. Nor did we know the destinations of the small number of Irish school-leavers going to universities abroad. – Yours, etc,