Abolition of pre-teen pupil selection will not solve North's school-leaver problem, says leading academic

Irish Times

28-04-2025

Northern Ireland
's problems with high numbers of children leaving school early and low education standards will not be solved by the abolition of pupils' selection examinations at 12 years of age, a leading academic has said.
However, Professor Anne Looney, the executive dean of the Institute of Education at
Dublin City University
, said the Republic's system should 'not be too smug' because it streams children, too, but at 18, not at 12.
'They both effectively put children into a sorting hat and pull them out again – largely based on where they started off from socioeconomically. But the longer you can defer that the better it is for equality in all,' she said.
Educationalists in the Republic can be 'a bit smug in Dublin' looking at Northern Ireland's decision to put children through important examinations so early in their lives, but, in truth, the systems in both jurisdictions want to put children into boxes, she said.
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Education systems 'love sorting systems', she said, 'because the people who come out on the right side of that sorting process end up supporting the education system and keeping that lovely legacy of inertia' because they have benefited from it.
The Republic's 'Deis' disadvantaged schools are now international leaders, leaving academics here 'plagued by international visitors' coming to learn how Ireland closed the gap between rich and poor students in little more than a decade.
'It's not a complete success, and there's more to be done, but I think we have to recognise that it has been a very successful intervention,' Prof Looney told a conference hosted by the
Economic and Social Research Institute
(ESRI) on Monday.
An ESRI report said the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland had tended to lag behind their European counterparts in providing and investing in early years childcare, though there have been recent improvements.
'Inequalities in cognitive outcomes are found at an early age. At age five, children from lower income households and those whose mothers have lower education have poorer vocabulary skills,' the report says.
However, there are gaps in the longitudinal research tracking people over years, a problem that has been worsened by the United Kingdom's departure from the European Union, which took it out of a number of data-sharing agreements.
'Children's literacy and numeracy skills are high in both jurisdictions,' said the report, though it noted teachers in the Republic were more likely to rate their pupils highly for language, while their Northern counterparts did so for numeracy.
There are marked differences in education standards in both jurisdictions, with a far greater percentage of young people in Northern Ireland leaving school early – twice as many, per head of population.
Both education systems have an inbuilt bias towards directing second-level students towards colleges and university degrees, with options such as apprenticeships seen as 'second best', the report says.
Meanwhile, Northern Ireland's 'brain drain' of young talent is illustrated by the numbers who go to Britain to study, with around a quarter never coming back.
The cap on places in universities in Northern Ireland for local students has caused stiffer competition, though the ESRI report cites research suggesting that the existence of the cap to boost the number of places available for NI students, but also those from the Republic.