Professor John FitzGerald:

No. A huge amount of research has been done which has influenced the development of education in Ireland, going back to Damian Hannan and Emer Smyth in the early 1980s, who showed that selection within schools into classes - streaming in schools - is bad for the bottom half of the distribution and makes little or no difference to the top half. We have moved to gradually reduce streaming within schools but we are fortunate that, by accident, we did not end up with the English model of secondary, modern and grammar schools. We have integrated schools so if one lives in Bandon or wherever, one goes to the local school. Children are not streamed. It is the streaming of children which is the problem. That is not necessarily a reflection on second level schools. Vani Borooah has analysed this and estimates a Catholic ethos advantage in secondary schools in Northern Ireland of approximately ten percentage points. It is significant but that may not be due to the schools; it may be due to parental expectations. He has not done the research, and we certainly have not done the research, on this but there is a big problem in Northern Ireland which we have managed to address in the Republic. Twenty years ago we had 20% of early school leavers. The major success during the years of the financial crisis was a major improvement in educational participation. Education was protected and we went from a figure of 15% to 5% in respect of early school leavers, while everything else was in crisis. How that is dealt with is an issue for politicians in Northern Ireland. It is not for somebody from the Republic to come up with the answer but the research done by Vani Borooah shows that there is a major problem in that regard.