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Gaelscoil students come out on top

June 15, 2010

The Department of Education in Northern Ireland recently carried out research which shows that pupils in Irish-medium primary schools are achieving higher marks in Maths and English than pupils in English medium schools.

The research undertaken compared primary school pupils from families who had similar economic backgrounds.

These finding are very interesting in the wake of recent findings from school inspectors who criticised the standard of a number of Irish medium schools in Northern Ireland.

Dr Reamaí Mathers from the organisation Comhairle na Gaelscolaíochta, said the emphasis that was placed on the performance of Irish Medium schools when the results of the inspections came out was incredibly unfair, especially considering that pupils from the Irish-medium schools were performing at a higher standard than their peers in the two most important subject in the curriculum.

Mathers pointed out that these new findings support the research recently undertaken at Queens University in Belfast where it was discovered that children from Irish Medium schools have a better short term memory that pupils from English medium schools which was found to be due to their bilingualism.