Feeder Schools League Tables 2020: How your local school fared

Use the scrollbar at the bottom of the table to scroll through the columns on the right to show the breakdown by third-level institution of where students went from each school. If viewing on mobile, turn your phone to landscape mode for a better experience.

How to read the tables

This table provides a breakdown of where pupils from the Leaving Certificate class of 2020 started in a higher education college in Ireland last autumn.

The figures do not include the many school-leavers who went into further education, such as post-Leaving Cert (PLC) courses. Nor does it cover those who pursued an apprenticeship, an “earn-and-learn” approach that leads to a qualification at either further education or higher-education level.

The table is a snapshot of “who went where”, although it must be treated with certain caution because not all colleges provide the information in the same way.

It is based on data from colleges in the Republic of Ireland, as well as Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Ulster, in Northern Ireland.

The table does not record students from the Republic who have enrolled in British colleges, nor the growing number of school-leavers who have taken up a college place elsewhere in the EU. Some schools, such as St Columba’s, Rathfarnham, have a tradition of pupils progressing to Britain for third level.

The table incorporates universities, including Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin), Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), institutes of technology, teacher training colleges (St Patrick’s, Mater Dei and the Church of Ireland College of Education are included in DCU data), National College of Art and Design (NCAD), National College of Ireland (NCI) and St Angela’s College, Sligo. Shannon College of Hotel Management is included in NUI Galway data.

It also includes data from two private colleges, DBS and Griffith.

The Leaving Cert “sits” column is based on figures supplied by the Department of Education. In 2020, the June Leaving Cert exams were replaced by a system of calculated grades, The “sits” refers to the number of students in each school to whom calculated grades were issued. While they represent the student numbers for Leaving Cert 2020 to date, they do not take account of the Leaving Cert exams in November 2020. The figures exclude those classed as external candidates. Where a school had fewer than 10 candidates entered for the Leaving Cert, it is not included.

The “sits” list does not include the so-called “grind schools”, such as the Institute of Education, Yeats College and the Dublin Academy of Education.

Primarily, the table captures first-time Leaving Cert students. It may also include students who sat the exam in previous years and used their results as a basis for college entry in 2020. Consequently, the number progressing to college credited to a particular school may not relate exclusively to 2020 “sits”. New schools will have no, or few, such past pupils to boost their numbers of college entrants.

In the case of students who sit the Leaving Cert more than once, some colleges, such as Trinity College Dublin (TCD), give only the last school attended. Others, such as University College Dublin (UCD), list every school at which the student sat the Leaving Cert, resulting in a repeat student being counted more than once. UCD, for instance, advises, that “in cases where, for example, a candidate sat the examination twice, the candidate will appear as a statistic under both institutions and be doubly entered in the data. The double-counting occurs even where the candidate repeated the examination in the institution where he or she first sat the examination.”

Such double-counting contributes to some schools showing a higher proportion of pupils entering college than is the case when compared with the number of “sits” in June. Where this happens, the percentage has been capped at 100pc. Schools with a relatively low number of Leaving Cert students can have a higher percentage of pupils attending third level.

Colleges advise that the schools’ data are provided to them for administrative purposes and that they cannot stand over the accuracy of the information if used for any other purpose, including tables such as are published here. There can be many reasons that corrections will be made to the data as it is updated.

The data was compiled by Ronan Price and the interactive graphic designed by Gabriel Bruton.