Yvonne O’Toole, principal of the Institute of Education, is standing outside the school’s entrance on Dublin’s Leeson Street as hordes of students pour outside on their lunch break.
She’s beaming – and with good reason. The private grinds college, where full-time students pay annual fees of up to €11,000 a year, has enrolled a record 1,650 students this year. There is a long waiting list to gain entry to sixth year, while thousands more students are due to attend its revision courses over the coming months.
“We’re officially the largest school in Ireland,” says O’Toole. “I’m very proud of the school, but I’m actually very proud of that fact.”
Business is booming in Ireland’s grinds industry, which is estimated to be worth anywhere between €30-40 million a year.
The institute, founded more than 50 years ago, was sold to UK-based schools group Dukes Education last year for just under €135 million.
Its main competitor, the Dublin Academy of Education in Stillorgan, south Dublin, is also running at capacity. It has about 340 full-time fifth- and sixth-year students and is due to expand next year when it moves to a larger premises in Blackrock.
The online grinds business is also heating up. A newcomer on the scene is Grinds360, which raised more than €3 million from investors who include former and present rugby players such as Brian O’Driscoll, Caelan Doris and Jordan Larmour.
The service promises “cutting-edge AI technology” and some of Ireland’s best teachers with a track record of delivering “exceptional student results” for up to 19 subjects for a cost of €999 a year.
There are dozens of other online competitors such as Studyclix (up to €75 a year), as well as private grinds offered by individual teachers in almost every town and village across the country (sometimes the same teachers who teach children in class) typically for €50 an hour.
There is a growing grinds culture in Ireland, far in excess of many other European countries. Almost 60 per cent of Leaving Cert students are estimated to be availing of grinds, up from below 50 per cent a decade ago, according to a 2022 ESRI study.
They are most common among children of well-off professional or managerial parents hoping to give their sons and daughters an edge in the CAO points race.
The study’s authors, Prof Selina McCoy and Prof Delma Byrne, found that the grinds culture had become normalised, stemming from the high-stakes nature of the Leaving Cert. They said they were now “an accepted component of examination success for many students”.
Since Covid, in particular, many grind schools say demand has “exploded” due to a combination of grade inflation, higher CAO points and a sense that competition for top college courses has grown even fiercer.
“It just skyrocketed over the last few years and got crazy with demand for grinds ,” says Rónán Murdock, a former grinds teacher who is now chief executive of Grinds360.
The sector has no shortage of critics. The education establishment tends to depict grind schools as military training grounds where students are drilled to produce perfect answers to potential questions based on marking schemes.
Others argue that students who leave their regular school to attend full-time grinds lose their social ties with friends and are deprived of a rounded education with access to sport, extracurricular activities and pastoral supports.
Campaigners, such as Prof Kathleen Lynch, argue more broadly that grinds contribute to inequality by allowing the most affluent to give their children an advantage to dominate entry to the most elite higher education courses.
Naturally, grind schools see things very differently.
At the Dublin Academy of Education, the bright classrooms with multicoloured furniture are full to capacity.
“We’re an academic school rather than a holistic school,” says Ciarán Hartigan, the school principal. “Our primary focus is on the academics rather than trying to shape the individual as a whole.”
Contrary to public perception, he says grind schools are not about cramming, rote learning or teaching to the test, he says.
“The idea that a student could just learn off a number of essays and regurgitate them blindly in the exam and get full marks? That day is gone. It hasn’t worked since the ‘90s, and I’m not sure how well it ever worked.”
The focus, he says, is on developing an understanding a subject through “great teaching”, as well as how to succeed in the exam.
Over at the Institute of Education, O’Toole also says the traditional depiction of a grind school is misplaced. She says her “independent school” now offers sports, extracurricular activities such as debating and robotics, while there is big focus on guidance and wellbeing. It is, however, unashamedly academic in focus.
“It’s important to say, this school isn’t for everybody,” O’Toole says. “We interview students coming in here and ask: ‘Is this school right for you?’ You have to be hardworking. You don’t have to be 600 points. You might be heading for 450 – great – but you have to want to work. It’s about that passion of wanting to work.”
The school’s intake, she says, includes students from right across the city and wider commuter belt.
“Most of our parents struggle to pay the fees. Many of them take out a loan to pay the fees,” she says. “They value education and many of them have saved for many years to send their students to us.”
The growth of the grinds industry means there is fierce competition for the best teachers. Those who are textbook authors or State exam markers are in high demand. In some cases, the most highly regarded educators are on hefty six-figure salaries.
At Grinds360, Murdock says his service has hired 15 teachers, 11 on a full-time basis. While top teachers can earn considerable sums, he says they are made to work for it.
“I was one of those grinds teachers paid a really high salary, but you work incredibly hard; you can be working six days a week, giving up your evenings all the time,” he says. “Yes, the money can be brilliant but the volume of work is huge. If you’re a brilliant economics teacher, you might have 200 students and then 200 projects. A student might send your four or five emails on that project, and suddenly that’s 1,000 emails. You’re looked after, but your workload increases massively.”
The popularity of grinds, however, is beginning to raise uncomfortable questions around the quality of teaching in regular schools. Teacher shortages in key subject areas mean many students have either reduced subject choice or may be taught by an unqualified or “out of field” teacher.
Parents often are unaware, given that principals fear reputational damage if they highlight these difficulties. Some schools, especially in the south Dublin area, have been losing significant numbers of students to grind schools as a result.
Another attraction, say some grind school operators, is the older age profile of students who want more independence and fewer rules. Hartigan, principal of the Dublin Academy, says they offer a “college-lite” atmosphere: there is no uniform, no bell for classes and no parent-teacher meetings. Mobile phones are allowed in common areas, but not in classes or the study hall.
“My own experience personally in traditional schools was that with senior students … they’ve almost outgrown a particular education environment or set of rules which are imposed on them,” he says.
For all the cost of grinds, however, the extent to which they boost students’ performance is uncertain. The most recent ESRI study on this area found that private tuition appeared to pay off only for students with lower levels of achievement, with little if any gain for their middle and higher achieving peers.
It does raise the question: is this a sector simply feeding into students’ – and parents’ – insecurities about the Leaving Cert?
Murdock of Grinds360 says, if anything, they are easing students’ anxieties; additional tuition complements, rather than supplants, what a student learns in their regular school.
“They give another perspective to students which can bolster their answers,” he says. “Students are working very hard and there is a lot of pressure to get the course done and pressure on points … with online videos, they don’t have to worry about missing parts of the course. If anything, this is reducing stress.”