To grind or not to grind? It's a question that many parents and secondary students ask. Gráinne Fallerreports on the pros and cons of getting an extracurricular boost

Many parents are faced with the grind dilemma at some stage in their child's education. CAO points are high and the Leaving Cert course is large and broad. If your child is struggling, should you let them tough it out or pay for a grind? What if they're really falling behind?

Grind schools feature prominently in feeder school lists. Surely that means your child will have a better chance at succeeding if you just send them to one of those altogether? Then again, a recent ESRI survey of Junior Cert students found that grinds make little or no difference to exam results. Now what are parents and students supposed to think?

On the release of those survey results, unions and politicians rounded on the grind schools with gusto. The results "cast cold water on the value of these grinds" said John White, general secretary of the ASTI. Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore asked whether grinds "undermine the teaching standards of secondary school". Minister for Education Mary Hanafin said that while she respected parents' rights to make choices for their children's education, she doesn't think it should be necessary to pay for grinds.

But are students and parents really naive enough to pay for grinds if they don't see an improvement in school work and exam results? Surveys from the ESRI and grinds provider Student Enrichment Services have variously put the number of students taking grinds at 25 to 50 per cent for Junior Cert students and up to nearly 70 per cent for Leaving Cert students. Students are flocking to grinds. Parents are paying for them. Teachers (union members for the most part) are giving them. Why, then, does the educational establishment hate them so much?

"If schools were running a tight ship, we'd close in the morning," said John Morris of the Institute of Education, Dublin. "We took something that is free and made it better. People are willing to pay for it. It's like going to the Blackrock Clinic or engaging a good barrister - it costs money, but it does the trick."

John Brennan, founder of the Ballinteer Institute, a tuition centre in Dundrum, Co Dublin, said: "Everybody is ignoring the elephant in the room which is bad teachers. Sometimes the worst teachers will get the best results because a third of their class is coming for grinds. It's absolute rubbish to say that grinds don't work."

According to White, focusing on bad teaching is a huge oversimplification. "Let's say that 40 per cent of students are taking grinds for the sake of argument. That argument suggests therefore that 40 per cent of teachers in the country are not doing their jobs properly. That's nonsense."

There is probably truth on both sides of this argument, but the reason for the boom is grinds is multilayered. "Is the popularity of grinds down to good marketing by the grind schools?" pondered Ruairi Quinn, the Labour Party's spokesperson on education and science. "Is it a fashion among students and parents? Is it down to underperforming teachers? I just don't know."

Actually, it's probably all of those things and more. The media have to take responsibility for its role in the increasing profile of grind schools. Feeder school lists and exam coverage contribute to the idea that the state exams are the be-all and end-all of a teenager's education.

Then again, said Brennan, the demand for grinds is not new. "Grinds have always existed. The demand is there but I don't think it's necessarily growing. The bottom line is that the student has to compete in the exam system and the parents want to do their best for them."

But does it work? One side says yes, the other says no. Sources from within the grind schools themselves suggest that it depends on the kind of tuition given. Weekly classes, either in a group or a one-to-one situation, can benefit students who are struggling or want to push for the A1. However, revision courses at Christmas and Easter can be massive and some crash courses on one subject may last for six hours. Some teachers tell stories of junior students doing two such courses in one day - 12 straight hours of revision. In fifth year, some schools can have class sizes in excess of 70 students.

"Parents should ask themselves why they would take a student out of a public school with state-of-the-art facilities, where they are taught in class sizes of 20 to 25, and put them into such a situation," said one teacher. "Unfortunately, too many parents believe that their children who are underperforming in their state schools will be saved by the grind school. However, if a student is poorly motivated to begin with, this will not change on entering the doors of a grind school."

Morris concedes that grind schools may not achieve miracles. "If a child isn't motivated, the amount they learn from a Christmas revision course, for example, will be vastly different from a student who takes the notes given and revises them over the next few months."

He also disputed the idea that large class sizes devalue the learning. "The teachers are good, the notes are good and, in the case of full-time students, if they're having difficulties there are voluntary tutorials that they can go along to if they need a bit of help in a certain area. Those groups would be a lot smaller."

Official ASTI policy disapproves of members giving grinds or working in grind schools. But White accepted that grinds can be beneficial in certain circumstances. "I don't want to give the impression that a child who has fallen behind in school wouldn't benefit from extra help, but this fallback culture that grinds have created is damaging."

This so-called "fallback culture" is the idea that grinds can be seen as a safety net by students who may not have worked consistently throughout the year. "Overall, the grind culture is bad in an educational sense," White added. "It encourages the notion of a magic bullet, which creates a false view of what education is about."

In the end it seems that while one side talks about education the other side talks about exam preparation. "It's sad," said Brennan, "but any teacher who is misguided enough to think we're educating students is wrong. We're preparing students for an exam in this system, and education is a long way from that."