What the data actually says
Do girls', boys' or fee-paying schools get better maths results?
Parents ask this constantly. The honest answer is that the public data does not show what most people think it shows, and the one good study on the question found something more useful than a league table.
Boys and girls at Higher Level
This is the one comparison the CSO does publish. In 2024, of everyone who sat Leaving Cert maths:
39.4%
of boys sat Higher Level
37.9%
of girls sat Higher Level
A gap of 1.5 percentage points. Most people expect it to be far larger. The more useful fact in that table is the one nobody quotes: roughly three in five students of both sexes sit Ordinary Level maths, so the common experience is not Higher Level at all.
Most students are in mixed schools
Of the 118,692 students taking maths in 2021, 63% were in mixed schools. The single sex sector is smaller than the debate about it suggests.
| School type | Schools | Students taking maths |
|---|---|---|
| Mixed | 466 | 74,603 |
| Girls' schools | 135 | 23,919 |
| Boys' schools | 108 | 20,170 |
CSO EDA86, 2021. These are take-up figures. The CSO does not publish grades broken down by school type.
Fee-paying schools, and what the research found
There are 58 fee-charging secondary schools in Ireland teaching about 27,424 students, roughly 7 to 9% of the total. They are heavily concentrated in Dublin, which holds 54% of them while having 26% of schools overall.
9%
ahead at Leaving Cert. And already ahead by roughly the same margin before they started secondary school.
- Students in fee-charging schools finished about 9% ahead in Leaving Certificate performance.
- They already had roughly the same lead in measured ability before they started secondary school.
- Once prior attainment and social background are controlled for, the effect of the school itself is significant but marginal.
That is the useful part. A school that admits students who are already ahead will produce results that are already ahead, and a league table cannot tell those two things apart. This study could, because it followed the same 3,105 students from before secondary school through to the Leaving Cert.
O'Connell & Marks (2023), Irish Educational Studies, using the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal survey. Read the study
What nobody can tell you
There is no public dataset linking school type to maths grades. Not for single sex versus mixed, not for fee-charging versus free scheme, and not for boarding schools, which no public dataset identifies at all.
Feeder school tables are the nearest thing, and they measure progression to third level rather than grades. As the research above shows, they mostly reflect which students a school admits.
So if someone tells you a particular type of school gets better maths results, ask where the number came from. Usually there isn't one.