Editing Gaelscoil (section)

==Social status and function==
Gaelscoileanna have acquired a reputation for providing excellent academic results at a moderate cost. They have been described as a system of "positive social selection" giving better than average access to tertiary education and the social and employment opportunities which follow. An analysis of "feeder" schools which send students on to tertiary level institutions shows that 22% of Irish-medium schools send all their students on to tertiary level, compared to 7% of English-medium schools.<ref>{{cite journal|title=Language and Occupational Status: Linguistic Elitism in the Irish Labour Market|journal=The Economic and Social Review|year=2009|volume=40|publisher=The Economic and Social Review, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter, 2009|page=446|url=https://ideas.repec.org/a/eso/journl/v40y2009i4p435-460.html|last1=Borooah|first1=Vani K.|last2=Dineen|first2=Donal A.|last3=Lynch|first3=Nicola|access-date=16 October 2015|archive-date=29 March 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150329152128/https://ideas.repec.org/a/eso/journl/v40y2009i4p435-460.html|url-status=live}}</ref>

Supporters argue that the bilingualism resulting from early acquisition of another language is of general intellectual benefit and helps children to learn still other languages. Irish-language advocates of the immersion approach sometimes refer to studies showing that bilingual children have advantages over monoglot children in other subjects.<ref name="B&H">{{cite book|last=Bialystok and Hakuta|title=In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second-Language Acquisition|publisher=[[Basic Books]]|year=1994|location=New York|isbn=0-465-03281-8}}</ref>