Local secondary schools hit top spots in rankings list
By Aura McMenamin
Loreto High School, Coláiste Cois Life, and The King’s Hospital school, are three secondary schools in Dublin South West that can be rightfully proud of their rankings in the top 100 schools in Ireland.
The list, compiled by The Sunday Times, ranked 400 schools in the country in terms of students’ progression to third-level education in Ireland.
Loreto High School in Rathfarnham, a private and all-girls school, placed well at number 23, and has seen 76 per cent of its girls go on to university.
A non-private school in Lucan also ranked very well as The Sunday Times’s 40th best school in the country. Coláiste Cois Life is a public, mixed Gaelcholáistí. After a gruelling Leaving Cert cycle, 68.9 per cent of its students in the Castle Road school have gone onto university.
At number 87 is The King’s Hospital school in Palmerstown. This private, mixed school offers boarding. The school ranks in the top 100 in the country with 61.3 per cent of its students going on to university.
The Sunday Times Parent Power survey is based on the percentage of students progressing to university and university-level institutions on the island of Ireland, as well as progression to all third-level institutions, averaged over three years to ‘erase annual anomalies’.
Loreto High School Principal Margaret O’Donoghue said she was ‘delighted’ with the results. She attributed the school’s success on the list as being ‘broader than academic’.
The school, one of four fee-paying schools in the Loreto group, has a strong Catholic ethos with a focus on activities that promote social justice.
Speaking to The Echo, Ms O’Donoghue said: “We look at the whole child. We have a strong sporting tradition, a strong debating tradition, a big focus on social justice. Self-actualisation is important.”
Principal at The King’s Hospital, John Rafter was disappointed with his school’s placement, saying it didn’t reflect the whole picture.
He said the list’s limitation to Irish third-level institutions didn’t take into account the success of schools where a proportion of students are from abroad. The King’s Hospital is a boarding school with almost 300 boarders.
He said: “We have a number of international students who go back to universities in Germany and Spain and have a number of students that go to university in the UK. The list doesn’t take this into account – for example we had a student that got 625 points [in his Leaving Cert] but went to university outside Ireland.
Mr Rafter said that he estimated around 95 to 98 per cent of his school’s Leaving Cert students go on to third-level institutions each year.
He said: “Schools like us get penalised. We should be way, way further up the list.”
He added that the fee-paying Church of Ireland school ‘welcomed diversity’ and had a variety of extracurricular activities such as an extensive music department; debating groups in Spanish, German, French and English, arts and drama.
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