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STUDY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES among Leaving Certificate students has slowed over the past five years, and the percentage of sixth-year students studying at least one foreign language has dropped for both girls and boys.
At the beginning of the 2019/2020 academic year, 67% of sixth-year boys and 84.6% of sixth-year girls were studying at least one foreign language, compared to 72.2% and 87.1% at start of the academic year 2015/2016.
However, the percentage of Leaving Certificate students studying a foreign language other than French has increased from 37.5% in 2015 to 45.5% in September 2019.
These languages include German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and Arabic.
74.4% of post-primary schools offer at least two foreign languages, an increase from 71.4% in 2015.
The figures have been published in a report by the Department of Education on Irish Education Indicators, which looks at education from early childhood to third grade.
The report found that “you can see strong differences in the percentages of girls and boys when it comes to STEM, particularly when biology is excluded.”
90.2% of sixth-year boys and 85.7% of sixth-year girls took one or more of the following STEM subjects in 2019/2020:
- Agriculture science
- applied mathematics
- biology
- chemistry
- physical
- physics and chemistry
- Engineering
- construction studies
- design and communication graphics
- technology
However, if biology is from that list, only 41.6% of sixth-year girls took one or more of the subjects, compared with 72.5% of boys.
In 2019/2020, 70% of fifth and sixth year students took the Leaving Certificate, 25% chose the Leaving Certificate Vocational and 5.1% of students chose the Leaving Certificate Applied.
The number of students who chose to repeat the certificate of completion has steadily decreased over the past five years, from 1,658 in 2015 to just 655 in the final academic year.
Transition year participation has increased each year, with 48,268 students taking the program in 2019, 74% of the year group.
There were 2,823 early school dropouts in 2019 that started the fifth year but did not earn the Bachelor’s Certificate, and a 9.3% gap in retention rate between DEIS post-primary schools and those that are not.
The proportion of primary and secondary school students in Catholic ethics schools has remained high but has continued to decline slightly: from 91.3% in 2015 to 90% last year of primary school students and from 52.9% to 50 , 5% of high school students during the same period.
The number of students who were directly related to the National Service for Educational Psychology (NEPS) fell to 7,392 in the last academic year from 8,561 in the previous year, which has been attributed to the impact of Covid-19.
Meanwhile, the number of days NEPS psychologists spent in support and development activities in schools increased from 5,285 to 6,260.
The report highlights that the “drop in case work and the consequent increase in support and development work often delivered remotely reflects the impact of Covid-19 on the ability to provide such direct services to learners as a result of the temporary closure of schools “.
The average number of students per teacher in elementary schools in 2019 was 150, while the average size of elementary classes was 24.1.
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In post-primary schools, the average pupil per teacher in 2019 was 12.8.
Higher education
Continuing and Higher Education Minister Simon Harris said there has been “a large increase in the number of people studying part-time or flexibly, including distance learning, and this was before the pandemic broke out” .
“I hope that we will maintain this flexibility going forward, allowing people to learn in the right place for them at the right time,” Harris said.
The number of part-time students increased from 37,249 in 2015 to 43,029 in 2018, and the number of students studying remotely increased from 6,015 in 2015 to 9 in 2017 in 2018.
The number of people enrolled in internships in September was 17,829, compared to 8,317 in 2015.
71,347 higher education students received support through a grant in 2019, a drop from more than 80,000 in 2015.
More data on indicators in higher education for the 2019/2020 academic year will be published in the first three months of 2021.
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