Disadvantaged pupils suffer most from lack of guidance [IrishTimes]
- Published: 14 December 2011
THE SCALING back of guidance counselling in schools will be most keenly felt among young students from disadvantaged backgrounds, according to an ESRI report.
Such students are “far more reliant on advice from their school in making post-school decisions, and particularly decisions in relation to higher education entry, educational quality and standards”, according to the paper by ESRI researchers Dr Emer Smyth and Dr Selina McCoy.
The report examines how the second-level school system can be improved at a time of cutbacks. The most recent OECD report highlighted an alarming drop in literacy levels among Irish teenagers and poor performance in maths and science.
It concludes that rigid grouping of students by ability, or “streaming”, harms overall educational outcomes. This happens, it states, because students assigned to lower ability classes tend to do much worse under streaming, while those assigned to higher ability classes do not make corresponding gains. So average student performance falls.
Full Story: www.irishtimes.com
