Despite Leaving Cert league tables, our children are not mere numbers

A LITTLE information is a dangerous thing, and a little information is what was used to print the school league tables published last weekend.

Some years ago the Department of Education fought all the way to the High Court to overturn the Information Commissioner's decision to provide newspapers with the Leaving Cert results achieved by each school.

Such information is used in Britain to produce elaborate annual guides to the 'best' and 'worst' schools, along with the predictable headlines about top gainers and top losers.

These high-selling supplements were of course an attractive proposition to the Irish media and several newspapers fought to get the necessary information. Their High Court defeat seemed to end the prospect that the public would be able to compare the exam results from different schools.

However, there proved to be a back door. When students start college, they fill in a form that includes what school they attended. A Freedom of Information request to universities elicited this data. So last year the newspapers were able to publish a chart based on how many students from each school went on to university in 2001.

The main beneficiary from this chart was Dublin's Institute of Education, a 'grinds' school that had more students than any other school going on to UCD and Trinity and thus topped the first tables, published last year.

A howl went up from mainstream schools that this chart was faulty on two counts. First, it took no account of the size of each school. Naturally a place with 450 Leaving Cert students such as the Institute of Education would have more students going on to university in any one year than a school with say, 50 students. The second problem was that the tables only took account of UCD and Trinity. Hard luck on schools sending dozens of candidates every year to UCC, UCG, DCU, Maynooth and the University of Limerick.

Subsequently the Farmer's Journal put right these wrongs.

It found out the numbers from each school who sat the exam and published its own table based on the proportion of students from each school who went to the seven universities.

Last Saturday, the Irish Times published a league table based on 2002 results (not, it should be noted, the 2003 results which came out this day last week).

Astonishingly, the mistakes made in the first ever league tables hadn't been rectified. It's still being done by numbers rather than proportions from each school. And the only colleges featured are UCD, Trinity and Maynooth. In other words, it is of very limited use indeed.

The Sunday Independent did a somewhat better job, taking in the seven universities and basing their rankings on proportions. On face value, a reliable table. But not quite.

With the best will in the world, there are still too many missing variables to construct a completely accurate table. What about, for example, repeat students? What school are they registered as having attended? Their original school or the place where they repeated their exams? And what about external candidates who sit the Leaving Cert in a school's exam centre but didn't attend that school? What about students who score well enough to go to university but choose not to? Or go to college in the North, or abroad? Or do other third level courses, including degree courses, in institutes of technology? Are they to be excluded from the calculations?

The problem is that we've gone from having no league tables to having tables that don't reflect reality.

At this stage the Government needs to make a decision. Either the full data gets published and it could be done at the push of a button in the Department of Education or else the loopholes in the system that allows these partial tables should be plugged.

Furthermore, it is clear from the British experience that once you publish tables you need to enhance greatly the protections given to parents and students. In Ireland we've now got tables without safeguards, which is the worst of all possible worlds.

There are dozens of documented cases in Britain where schools have fiddled their numbers, persuaded weaker students not to sit exams, and even helped young people cheat in exams.

Such corruption is inevitable. Schools that do badly in tables soon find themselves short of students. In many cases it prompts them to get their act together. Others are tempted to take short cuts.

IMAGINE the following scenario. School A is number 18 in the national league tables. School B, down the road, is number 8. School B enjoys glorious write-ups each year and hangs a banner with 'One of Ireland's Top Ten Schools' on the front gate. Parents queue for days to get their children's names on the waiting list.

School A, meanwhile, gets School B's rejects and is in danger of slipping further down the tables. A new principal is appointed. At the interview it's made quite clear that success or failure will be judged on the principal's ability to bring School A into the top 10.

Now consider this.

I heard of a lad who did the Leaving last year who was desperately poor at the books. Full of life and personality, supportive of his fellow students and always available to help out. But very weak academically. His teachers worked like never before and when he got six passes (all at ordinary level) they regarded it as their finest achievement. What hope would that lad have if he attended School A? The principal knows such a boy would never make university. As far as league tables are concerned, he's a liability. Not a human bring, not a fantastic and hard-working youngster who happens to be in the bottom percentile of academic ability, but a statistical liability.

Wouldn't it be the easiest thing in the world to quietly ease him out after fourth year, having had a confidential chat with the parents and agreed that the sooner their son got some work experience, the better? For his own good, of course.

Of course league tables have certain advantages. If there are two schools side-by-side and one is going much better than the other, then the pressure is on to explain why. And in this age of openness and free access to information, it seems bizarre that parents have to choose schools based on hearsay and rumour.

On this issue, the Department of Education is caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is that just about every interest group from the school management bodies to the ASTI are against publishing league tables based on Leaving Cert results. The department itself has said that publication would be misleading and unfair.

The hard place is, of course, that the genie is now out of the bottle.

People are now used to seeing schools ranked by results and newspapers are now used to publishing tables. A minister who rows back on these freedoms will impress teachers' unions but will incur the ire of many ordinary people. The chances are that successive ministers will let this sleeping dog lie.

A studied inertia will keep everybody quiet, but it's not good enough.

If we're going to have league tables, then we need proper ones, with full information and safeguards in place to prevent abuse. If, on the other hand, the Government decides to stick to its policy that league tables damage an education system, then it should take the appropriate action.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.