Internationalising practices and representations of the ‘other’ in second-level elite schools in Ireland

Abstract

While Irish elite schools have adopted some internationalising practices, international students are often erased from their ‘public faces’. Based on interviews and analysis of schools' websites, this paper argues that Brooks and Waters' [2014. “The Hidden Internationalism of Elite English Schools.” Sociology, advance online publication April 2] argument that elite schools hide their internationalism to preserve an explicit national identity for strategic purposes largely applies to the Irish case. In addition, it explores how features characteristic of Irish elite educational settings can help understand ambiguous attitudes to the international ‘other’, who is not only hidden but also at times ‘Irish-ised’ as these schools cultivate cultural identities defined primarily along ethno-national lines.

Keywords:

• Elite education
• Ireland
• internationalisation
• international recruitment
• cultural capital
• elite identities

Notes

1 In Ireland many second-level schools were founded by religious orders and congregations and remain private. In 1967 the State took on the cost of secondary education in participating private schools, while others preferred to receive lower amounts of state subsidies and to continue charging fees in order to maintain their social exclusivity. Therefore the term ‘fee-paying’ is used here instead of ‘private’ to avoid confusion, since many private schools can in fact be attended for free.

2 Unlike fee-paying schools, non-fee-paying schools receive a fixed sum of money per eligible (resident) student from the State. They are not supposed to charge fees to compensate this loss of income; neither are they expected to internationalise their recruitment as they are supposed to prioritise their local communities (DES 1993, 2004). Some international agencies offer places in non-fee-paying schools but it is understood that only a small number of places are available. For both fee-paying and non-fee-paying schools, the number of teachers allocated by the State also depends on the number of eligible students registered.

3 The remaining school is affiliated to ‘the School of Philosophy’.

4 Typologies such as the one developed by Gaztambide-Fernández (2009) are helpful to separate out elite schools from other fee-paying schools. In the Irish context, elite schools are defined as those schools which are at the intersection of three groups: schools with high fees, schools with high rates of admission to selective college courses, and schools with numerous alumni in the Irish Who's Who.

5 They were also more affected by the recent budget cuts, which took away some of the subsidies that were specific to non-Catholic schools within the sector. Since 2011, five fee-paying schools have joined the non-fee-paying sector; four of these are Protestant schools.