Measuring the wrong thing

By almost any objective criteria, school league tables are a bad idea. They are not comparing like with like, they can quickly give a school a bad name, and they do not reflect on the real miracles going on every day in schools around the country. All the same, I – like most other people – love them.

There is something uniquely voyeuristic about reading the league tables when they come out every year. Despite the unfairness of the whole thing, we all love seeing who has slipped, which schools have come on, and where on the table our own schools or our rivals during our school days are placed. We all like seeing some of the places with high opinions of themselves being knocked off their perches by tiny schools from different parts of the country, and by Gaelscoileanna in general. My own school, by the way, is languishing at number 27 out of 31 schools in Cork city.

Both the Department of Education and the teachers unions are totally opposed to league tables of any kind. This means that despite numerous court challenges tables of actual Leaving Certificate results achieved in schools have not been released, and it is Government policy not to release such tables. The result has been that the newspapers use the Freedom of Information Act to extract information from third level institutions about the schools their first years came from. Even the papers involved admit that the league tables they produce are a very crude yardstick with which to judge how a school performs, and in most cases, it is grossly unfair to the students and teachers involved.

Take for example Palmerstown Community College. The results show that they got just under 27 per cent of their Leaving Cert pupils into third level institutions by means of the CAO this year, a figure which is dwarfed by the 90 per cent figure achieved by a few private schools in Dublin. But you might remember this year's Leaving Cert students from Palmerstown for another reason. It was they who mounted the wonderful protest outside the Dáil and on the airwaves to keep their colleague, Nigerian Olunkunle Eluhanla, from being deported. A more caring and articulate group as you are likely to meet anywhere in the country – yet this is reflected nowhere in the league tables.

But despite the unfairness, the tables do give some pretty valuable information. In my own case, the school I attended succeeded in sending 26.67 per cent of its students on to third level, just six of those to UCC. That figure would put the school somewhere near the bottom of the tables for any county in the country. In my own time at the school, the figure would have been about twice that level. So what happened in the meantime? At one time it was a school which had a very strict entrance exam and people sent their children from miles around to attend. About half of my classmates in a city school were actually from the countryside and used to travel in every day.

What has changed is that the entrance exam, used as a way of screening new students, is now gone. In my time you were streamed from the moment you got into the place. The only time you could move out of that stream was when your Inter Cert results came out and classes were changed about. In effect, it meant that the best streams got the best of everything, while the worst had little expected of them. It was a system repeated in many large schools where sport also played a major role. It was unfair to anyone who might have been a slow starter, but in the end it got more results. According to the league tables many of the larger traditional no fees schools have suffered a similar decline in results.

What's the answer? Many teachers I know, including the couple I have met from my own school, want the entrance exam brought back. It would give the better students, and those who benefit from more parental involvement, a better chance of getting ahead. It would also stop the large traditional schools – many of them former Christian Brothers schools – from continuing on a downward spiral and maybe put them back on track. Or maybe those schools could take a lesson from St Flannan's in Ennis which has escaped the downward spiral of other similar schools. With nearly 1,000 pupils, St Flannan's is one of the most renowned sporting schools in the country. They are also number 36 on the Sunday Times list, a position that throws down a challenge to the North Mons, the Joeys, the O'Connell's and all the other big traditional schools who have been slipping for years.

Fergal Keane is a reporter on RTÉ's Five Seven Live programme