CORA
Cork Open Research Archive (CORA) is UCC’s Open Access institutional repository which enables UCC researchers to make their research outputs freely available and accessible.
UCC Research Communities
Recent Submissions
Overview of primary education – school year 2008/09
(Education Matters, 2009) Hyland, Áine
This time last year, the world of education looked forward with confidence to a new school year in which primary education would no longer be the Cinderella of Irish education. Years of lobbying by teachers and parents had resulted in a Programme for Government (2007 to 2012) which recognised the importance of primary education and made specific commitments to improved funding and resourcing. We looked forward to reduced class sizes – and awaited the delivery of the commitment that the staffing schedule would be reduced from 27:1 by one point per year from 2008/9, so that by 2010/11 there would be one teacher for every 24 children. We looked forward to an increase in the day-to-day funding of primary schools, and particularly the doubling of the capitation grant. We anticipated new investment in and support of school-age childcare, “whereby children would be given access to a range of after-school and holiday-time activities, with a major focus on sports and arts”. Expectations were high – but they were soon to be dashed. During the summer of 2008, the first rumblings of what was to become an economic earthquake were felt throughout Ireland. The Celtic Tiger had disappeared and the weak mewing of a pathetic kitten began to be heard. By October, when the earlier than usual 2009 budget was announced, the writing was on the wall for most of the promises of the Programme for Government. The situation was to disimprove even more six months later in April 2009 when the Supplementary Budget was announced. The overall Education Budget would be reduced by €81 million to €9.493 billion. This would result in further reductions in teaching posts; reduction of special classes in mainstream primary schools and further cuts in all sectors of Irish education.
A History of Ireland’s School Inspectorate, 1831-2008 by John Coolahan and Patrick F. O’Donovan
(Department of Education and Science, 2009-11) Hyland, Áine
This book is a veritable tour de force – a history of the Irish school inspectorate (primary, intermediate/secondary and technical/vocational) over a period of 175 years – both before and after Independence. No history of Irish education on this scale has previously been attempted – and only John Coolahan could have carried it off so successfully. While a reader might expect a book of over 300 pages to be dense and impenetrable, this is not at all the case. It is an eminently readable and very well structured book. As is appropriate to the way the education system was administered until relatively recently, and in particular the way the inspectorate was organised, the three branches of the inspectorate are treated in separate chapters throughout most of the book. With a different author, this could have resulted in a sense of fragmentation and discontinuity. But Coolahan’s easy familiarity with the history of Irish education results in a book in which cross-referencing comes naturally and where links are provided where necessary. It is only in the recent two decades that an integrated inspectorate has finally emerged and the transition is well dealt with in Chapter 16. The more recent re-structuring of the inspectorate is documented in Chapter 17.
Has there been grade inflation in Irish universities? The argument against
(2008-11) Hyland, Áine
The statistics speak for themselves. More students are graduating today with an honours degree than was the case a generation ago. Forty years ago, less than 30% of undergraduates were awarded an honours degree compared to 75% today. But to use words such as “dumbing down” or “grade inflation” to describe this phenomenon is, in my view, unfair to present day students who, I would argue, generally deserve the grades which they are awarded. I believe that it is wrong to interpret the improvement in the proportion of students getting an honours degree as artificial grade inflation or to imply that students are awarded grades or marks that are undeserved. The academic standard of most students entering Irish universities is considerably higher today than it was a generation ago. While the Leaving Certificate points system is far from perfect, it has resulted in students entering university today with Leaving Certificate results that were unheard of in the 1960s. It has also led to a culture of hard work, confidence and competitiveness among students on a scale unimagined a generation ago.
The patronage of national schools
(Education Matters, 2010-06) Hyland, Áine
There are currently about three thousand primary (national) schools in Ireland. About 94% are under the patronage of the Roman Catholic Church; about 3% are under the patronage of the Church of Ireland; a very small number of schools are under the patronage of the Presbyterian or Methodist Churches; two schools are under Muslim patronage; there is one school under Jewish patronage; there are 56 schools in the Educate Together network; and about the same number under the patronage of An Foras Gaelscolaiochta. A small number of special schools for intellectually and physically challenged children are under the patronage of a variety of organisations and bodies, including St. Michael’s House and other corporate bodies.
Asymptotic guarantees for Bayesian phylogenetic tree reconstruction
(Taylor & Francis, 2025-07-23) Kirichenko, Alisa; Kelly, Luke J.; Koskela, Jere; Agence Nationale de la Recherche; UK Research and Innovation
We derive tractable criteria for the consistency of Bayesian tree reconstruction procedures, which constitute a central class of algorithms for inferring common ancestry among DNA sequence samples in phylogenetics. Our results encompass several Bayesian algorithms in widespread use, such as BEAST, MrBayes, and RevBayes. Unlike essentially all existing asymptotic guarantees for tree reconstruction, we require no discretization or boundedness assumptions on branch lengths. Our results are also very flexible, and easy to adapt to variations of the underlying inference problem. We demonstrate the practicality of our criteria on two examples: a Kingman coalescent prior on rooted, ultrametric trees, and an independence prior on unconstrained binary trees, though we emphasize that our result also applies to nonbinary tree models. In both cases, the convergence rate we obtain matches known, frequentist results obtained using stronger boundedness assumptions, up to logarithmic factors. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.