Schools – evidence and education

Sir, – If you are afflicted by a serious illness you can reasonably expect that your treatment will not be determined by your doctor’s idiosyncratic opinions. Whether they consider the mechanism of action of this drug particularly ingenious, liked that pharmaceutical representative or hold shares in the other corporation is irrelevant – you should expect your treatment to be based on evidence of its efficacy rather than such hunches and speculation. This constitutes evidence-based medicine, and it matters because, in the treatment of your condition, you are only likely to get one chance.

Education is, likewise, a matter wherein we only get one chance. You might repeat the odd exam or even year, but broadly the process is deeply formative and cannot be redone. It thus seems not merely ludicrous but, arguably, dangerous to change our apparently excellent system for reasons based on baseless or ideological speculation.

Kevin McLoughlin (Letters, March 23rd) dismisses the fact that single-sex schools perform better as a "very narrow academic focus". He then refers to a "world where sexual violence and domestic abuse make . . . news" before concluding that mixed-sex schools "can only be for the betterment of society". This conclusion does not in any way follow from the points preceding it. If there is compelling data that the one-third of our students who attend segregated schools are more likely to perpetrate such crime, that would indeed be a reason to change those institutions. However, it is equally possible that most perpetrators of such abuse attended mixed schools. But what evidence we have – narrowly academic as it may be – does not appear to support making major changes to what are, by most relevant criteria, our best-performing institutions of learning. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN O’BRIEN,

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Kinsale,

Co Cork.