Gaelscoil

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Bunscoil in Newry

A gaelscoil (Plural: gaelscoileanna) is an Irish-speaking school, often also co-educational, usually found in Ireland, but outside the Irish speaking Gaeltacht areas. Irish is the working language for these schools. Most of the schools operate under the patronage of Foras Pátrunachta na Scoileanna LánGhaeilge.^{[citation needed]}

There are currently 31,000 pupils attending gaelscoileanna, with 168 gaelscoileanna at primary level and 43 schools at post-primary level (gaelcholáistí), in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.^{[citation needed]} Gaelscoileanna account for 1% of the Northern Irish school system.^{[citation needed]} The largest gaelscoil in Belfast is Coláiste Feirste.^{[citation needed]} There is now at least one gaelscoil in all 32 traditional counties of Ireland and several in each of the bigger cities^{[citation needed]} — for example Derry has nine.

There are currently nine counties on the island of Ireland that do not have a second-level gaelscoil. These are: Laois, Offaly, Leitrim, Roscommon, Cavan, Sligo, Longford, Fermanagh and Down.

	Ulster	Munster	Leinster	Connacht
Bunscoileanna (Primary schools)	41	46	64	18
Iar-bhunscoileanna (Secondary schools)	11	22	17	13

The gaelscoileanna originated at the turn of the century during the Gaelic Revival. Bilinguality from an early age is recommended by many linguists, as it helps children become more adept at learning additional languages. Some studies have shown that bilingual children have advantages over monoglot children in other subjects.^[1]

Nowadays in Ireland, many people send their children to these schools, as they would not otherwise have much exposure to Irish.^{[citation needed]} Ireland is predominantly English-speaking, and although (in the Republic of Ireland) non-Gaelscoil schools also have Irish as a mandatory subject, many students leave with only a rudimentary knowledge of the language.^{[citation needed]} There are both Irish-speaking primary and secondary schools, called bunscoileanna and meánscoileanna respectively, these are the lower two tiers of education in Ireland before college (coláiste) and university (ollscoil) - third level education.

A gaelscoil is an Irish-medium primary school. A Gaelcholáiste is an Irish-medium secondary school.

Leitrim has had it's second gaelscoil since september 2007 in Manorhamilton, see http://www.gaelscoileanna.ie/index.php?page=primary_schools&action=by_province&province_id=1&county_id=17

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[edit] References

^ Bialystok and Hakuta (1994). In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second-Language Acquisition. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-03281-8.