Towards a Better Future

Chapter Seven: The School System: Equality, Inclusion and Rights
racism. The challenges for the churches collectively, who own or manage so much of the education
system, are that they must not only promote equality (and, indeed, the thorny question of admissions
of children of other faiths and none) but must also face up to such roles as they play in the
stratification of the school system and unequal outcomes at second level, in order to address
inequality and disadvantage.
GENDER
In terms of educational inequality, gender is sometimes regarded as an unimportant differentiating
variable. The reverse is actually the case. It is a variable, however, in which there have been important
fluctuations in patterning over the past three decades. In Ireland and internationally, girls now
generally outperform boys. In OECD countries, the average gender gap in reading performance is
substantial. Boys are significantly more likely than girls to demonstrate a poor level of literacy
performance. Boys tend to perform better on average in Mathematics than girls (OECD, 2010)
whereas data on special educational needs show that boys outnumber girls by two to one (Dyson
& Gallannaugh, 2008). From a position where girls achieved more poorly than boys in public
examinations thirty years ago, girls now outperform boys in most areas (O’Connor, 2007).
Pedagogical practices, which take account of pupils’ different learning styles, are an essential tool in
addressing male (and indeed female) underachievement (OFSTED, 2003).
The disadvantageous gender difference for boys is far from unique to Ireland. Unicef Office of
Research (2016) points out that since the first PISA study in 2000, 15-year-old boys have consistently
done worse than girls have in reading. The gaps in favour of girls are largest in reading: in 2012, girls
outperformed boys in reading by a good margin (38 score points, or nearly one year of schooling)
on average across OECD countries. In 37 of the 39 countries studied, boys were significantly more
likely to be in the bottom decile of reading achievement than girls (ibid.).
There is one area where boys out-perform girls and this is at the higher end of the distribution in
Mathematics. Doris, O’Neill and Sweetman (2013) examined this gender gap in Maths scores at age
nine in primary schools. Examining the reasons for this gender gap, they argue, is important because
of the under-representation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
(STEM) careers. While there was tentative evidence that boys performed better in single sex schools,
there was no such evidence for girls. Thus, there was no evidence that the gender gap was smaller
in single-sex than in coeducational schools – if anything it was larger. Other variables proved
inconclusive in their effects.
The question of single-sex versus co-educational schooling arises in debate on policy from time to
time. Back in the 1980s, the DES funded the first study on this topic, conducted by the ESRI. This
was Schooling and Sex Roles: Sex Differences in Subject Provision and Subject Choice in Irish Post-primary
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