About Find a School

Find a School is a free, independent directory of all 4,234 schools in the Republic of Ireland — primary, secondary, special and preschool — built so that a parent can answer the questions that actually decide a choice, and check every answer against its source.

Why it exists

The information a family needs is public, and scattered across a dozen places that do not talk to each other: the Department of Education's register, the NCSE's special-class lists, the CSO's price statistics, Pobal's deprivation index, and several thousand individual school websites where the admission notices live as PDFs. Nobody assembles it. So the questions that matter — is this school oversubscribed, does it have an autism class, what does it actually cost, when does the application close — get answered by hearsay.

Two of those answers are structural, and the site states them plainly rather than softening them:

• Ireland has no school catchment areas.The Education (Admission to Schools) Act 2018 replaced them with published admission policies. The full explanation is here.
• Nor is there a national school-quality ranking.No official body publishes one, and we do not invent one. We publish facts with sources and leave the judgement to you.

Who is behind it

Find a School is an independent project, built and maintained in Ireland. It is not affiliated with the Department of Education, the NCSE, Tusla, or any school, patron body or estate agent, and it is not funded by any of them.

It takes no payment from schools. No school can pay to rank higher, to be featured, or to have information removed. There is no advertising that is dressed up as a recommendation, and nothing on the site is placed because someone paid for it to be there.

What can be checked, rather than who is asserting it, is the point: every figure carries a link to the document it was read from, and the methodology page sets out each source, how it is read, and what we refuse to publish.

Corrections

If something here is wrong about your school, we want to fix it, and a correction from the school itself outranks anything we have inferred. Email corrections@findaschool.ie with the school's roll number and what is wrong. Please say what the right figure is and where it is published, so the fix can carry its own source.

We would rather show nothing than show a number we cannot stand over. If you find a figure with no source behind it, that is a bug — tell us.

How it is built

Every figure on the site is traceable. The methodology page sets out each source, its licence, how often it changes, and where we have deliberately left a gap rather than guess.