Read these league tables with care
IT is not possible to measure which school is the best choice for any individual child but parents will seek out as much information as possible when deciding where to send their son or daughter.
Open days and school visits can help parents to get a feel for the set-up of a school, and the holistic and extracurricular benefits it can provide — and offer a glimpse at the physical environment a child will be learning in. Meeting teachers and staff also offers reassurance.
There is no way of measuring any of these vital facets in school league tables. Instead, league tables offer a narrow window through which we can view a school’s academic performance: how many pupils go to college from each school after sitting the Leaving Certificate.
Other school league tables only measure a school’s performance over a given year. What sets the Sunday Independent school league tables apart is that they offer more than a snapshot in time. They allow parents and educators to investigate how consistent a school is in terms of sending pupils to college or university.
This newspaper used 11 years of data, tracking almost 600,000 students who sat the Leaving Certificate between 2009 and 2019. These numbers are buried behind the figures on display in these pages. We have analysed where students sat their Leaving Certificate and traced resulting third level choices based on administrative figures made available by the country’s publicly funded colleges. Universities, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), institutes of technology, colleges of education, the National College of Art and Design, National College of Ireland and St Angela’s College in Sligo are all included.
Students who attended three private colleges — Griffith College, Dublin Business School and the Irish College of Humanities and Applied Sciences — are included, as are students who crossed the Border to take up places at Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Ulster.
Using 11 years of data creates complications that have been accommodated. For example, last year Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) was jointly designated a technological university with IT Blanchardstown (ITB) and IT Tallaght (ITT). They now come under the Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) umbrella. Between 2009 and 2018 the students who progressed to DIT, ITB and ITT were traced to each individual institution. This remains the case in our data for the years in question. However, students who progressed to TU Dublin after sitting the Leaving Certificate in 2019 have been tracked to the new university.
The tables have limitations and are not a panacea. It is not possible to trace students who went directly from school to Post-Leaving Cert (PLC) courses provided in colleges of further education due to a lack of information. This has an impact on the figures for schools actively encouraging students to explore the PLC route, making it seem as if a smaller number of students continue their education after sitting the State exams.
This also applies to schools encouraging students to explore options abroad. Students who go to Britain, another EU country and the US are not counted because it is not possible to collate and verify such data.
In some cases, a student may be counted twice in the data, for instance, if they repeated first year of college or are studying a second course. The figures can be skewed by anomalies dictated by rare and unusual individual circumstances. Because a small number of students may be double-counted, all of our figures are capped at 100pc. Figures are also rounded to the nearest whole number, so a school that sent 89.5pc of students to third level will be rounded up to 90pc.
Some schools will appear to have no figure for specific years in the table. This can be explained by the introduction of a mandatory transition year, schools not having a Leaving Certificate class in that year, or other similar quirks.
No decision on where to send a child to school should be made using these tables alone but they can provide parents with crucial material to inform decisions.