Disadvantaged students losing out as reading skills gap widens

The gap between the reading skills of the country’s richest and poorest students widened during the last decade, figures reveal.

The Department of Education is concerned at the at the development, which emerged from the latest analysis of our 15-year-olds’ performance in international tests carried out in 2009.

The average score among Irish students in reading was 496, just above the average of all developed countries in the OECD’s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), but our scores had the biggest drop of 38 countries since 2000.