EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITY IN IRELAND

Educational Inequality in Ireland

Educational Inequality in Ireland

Introduction

In this paper we will address the issue of class inequalities in educational opportunities among the adult population in the Republic of Ireland. The issue of persisting barriers has in recent years generated a range of lively theoretical debates and an impressive volume of research. At the centre of this debate have been differing expectations concerning the consequences of the processes of social and economic change experienced by industrial societies; involving fundamental restructuring of the class structure, increasing rationalization and substantial expansion of educational participation.

The Republic of Ireland provides a particularly appropriate test of the ascription to achievement hypothesis. As a consequence of late and rapid industrialization, recent surveys include cohorts who have experienced the transformation of agrarian society alongside those whose formative experiences preceded such change. Together with this transformation in the class structure a dramatic expansion in educational participation has taken place such that at present four-fifths of each cohort complete the higher stage of secondary education and two-fifths third level education. In the past thirty years absolute opportunities for educational and class mobility have never been higher and it is not our intention to deny the significance of such change. However, the objective of this paper is to go beyond a descriptive account of the expansion of educational opportunities in order to test whether the distribution of new opportunities in the second and third level sectors reflected a significant reduction in educational inequalities. An adequate assessment of the consequences of such expansion for class inequalities in educational participation has only recently become possible. If we take the age of twenty-five as a cut-off point by which the majority of people will have exited the education system, then it is clear that it is only since 1980 that any of the cohorts which benefited from free education would have appeared in our surveys (ERIKSON, 29).

Factor Contributing To Educational Inequality

Goldthorpe (1996) and Breen and Goldthorpe (1997) propose a model in which persisting class variation in educational decisions is accounted for through the operation of three mechanisms.

Their model assumes that families from different classes seek to ensure that their children acquire a class position at least as advantageous as that from which they originate or, in other words, they seek to avoid downward mobility. Families in different classes therefore have identical relative risk aversion they want to avoid, for their children, any position in life that is worse than the one from which they start. What is essential is that there should be some measure of risk associated with continuing in education.

Class differences in academic ability and expectations of success.

Class differences in the proportion of families in each class whose resources exceed the costs of their children continuing in education.

It is necessary to distinguish between the general decline in the influence of costs, which is reflected in overall participation rates, and a change in the pattern of costs across classes which might be expected to lead to ...