Single-sex schools perform very well

Sir, – One thing that Ireland does very well, and with great efficiency, is education. While we rank last of 36 OECD countries for educational expenditure, we are placed 13th for the outcomes we achieve with that budget.

Any desire to tinker with the sector should, clearly, be based on close scrutiny of what works best within that pool of data. If we are to look at eliminating single-sex schooling, it seems wise to consider the likely or possible effects of this change.

As your editorial states, only about a third of our students attend single-sex schools, and few new ones have opened in decades ("Single-sex schools: Segregation has had its day", March 18th).

One would therefore expect that the list of the best schools in the country would mostly feature these institutions. It appears then to be an inconvenient truth that single-sex schools perform very well. The Irish Times list of top feeder schools includes only two mixed schools in the top 10, and none in the top five (“Feeder schools – five takeaway points from the latest data”, January 7th). One of the two is a private school, the other a Gaelcholáiste. After decades during which “the Department of Education has not sanctioned” a new segregated school, that is a pretty poor return for what seems to be the standard approach.

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The statement that, once “adjusted for social class and prior ability”, there may be no significant difference between the two approaches is, like any statistical tweak, questionable. It certainly doesn’t suggest that they are in any way better.

We live in an intensely competitive world, a globalised knowledge economy wherein our strong reputation for education is perhaps our most crucial asset. It thus seems hard to justify changing the operation of most our our best schools for such nebulous reasons as that they might “risk inflating gender stereotyping”.

Should we not practice evidence-based education, looking at what works best in reality, and then trying to offer it to all students? – Yours, etc,

BRIAN O’BRIEN,

Kinsale,

Co Cork.