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but what about areas where all the schools are low-performers? This is often the case in disadvantaged areas. If most funds are given to those schools at the upper end of the school ranking table, then these lower end schools will be left even more underfunded than they currently are.
In a nice middle class area where 4 schools are getting good results and providing a good all round education and 2 schools are performing noticeably worse, its fair enough to reward the high performers. However, in a working class area where ALL the schools are ranked in the lower end of the league tables, surely it does not make sense to punish these schools by giving them less funding than the higher performing schools in the middle class are as it is not comparing like with like? I'm not sure what the solution here is - I can imagine the complexity and issues involved in creating different categories of schools and comparing performance within each group - but I don't think the alternative of simply giving most funding to the highest performing school is beneficial to society as a whole. In Blackrock the focus is on improving students' performance so that they get as many points as possible in the Leaving Cert. In Ballyfermot the emphasis is more on simply increasing the number of students that actually sit and pass the Leaving Cert.
Working class areas need major investment in education in order to provide young people with a full education to give them every oppurtunity to break the cycle and enter into third-level education and/or skilled/professional careers (e.g. how many lawyers per capita grew up in Tallaght as opposed to Dalkey?).
Having attended in a low-performing school and taught in a disadvantaged school, I'm of the opinion that ability is not the issue for many of these pupils - the lack of ambition is the key. I believe that if both pupils and their families in these areas were persuaded that they should undertake some form of further education in order to give them more oppurtunities in life, more pupils would apply themselves more fully to their work and set their ambitions higher. The trouble is in figuring out how to bring about this change and while I'm not exactly sure how to bring this about, I am certain that the current low levels of funding received by these schools is not helping matters.
Maybe increased funding for more and better career counsellors (i.e. better than the guy in my school who must have been on commission from the PLC colleges as he seemed to spend his time dissuading anyone so arrogant as to have applied to a university) would help educate both pupils and their families as to why they should make the effort to achieve as much as possible academically. One suggestion might be to have parents involved in some career counselling sessions so they can fully see what options their child could achieve.