The Class of 2020 are proof too much rests on 14 days
SHE was, I think now, very lucky. Certainly, as the days have gone on and reports racked up about bereft school leavers being downgraded by a system that everyone agrees was far from perfect, I’ve realised more and more just how fortunate my youngest was last Friday. Or at least, in the later part of last Friday – but I’ll come back to that.
Because, to be honest, almost every day since March 11 has been a trial for her. For all of them. ‘You’re lucky,’ said her brother when we went out for dinner to mark her results, ‘you didn’t have to sit a Leaving Cert.’ But honestly, who in their right mind would swap with the Class of 2020?
Leave aside, for a moment, the confusion, cancellations and constantly changing plans that blighted their final year in school. Let’s go straight to last week, bookended by the surreal awarding of results of untaken exams, on Monday, and the even more dramatic distribution of college places on Friday. Monday was briefly brilliant in our home; the relief of favourable results flooding the family after months when we worried that her school might be penalised for years of slightly underwhelming exam results.
But within an hour, her euphoria had given way to gloom. As reports flooded in of inflated CAO points requirements, she was no longer sure she would get her first, or even her third, choice come Friday. But more than that, she felt like a fraud. ‘I don’t feel as if I’ve earned it,’ she said when we went to eat in an eerily quiet restaurant in town, on a night that traditionally sees the streets teeming with tipsy Leaving Cert revellers. ‘It feels as if I’m getting into college by default.’
And that, surely, is the most damning indictment of our education system right there. We place so much emphasis on the antiquated, unfair test of memory and endurance that is the Leaving Cert, that bright young 18-year-old men and women can willingly dismiss the 14 years they spent in full-time education, just because they didn’t go through the last two weeks of it. And I know my daughter wasn’t alone. I know from her friends, from her group chats, from the quiet streets and from the sense of deflation that dominated last week, that the prevailing feeling of many of these young school leavers is that they haven’t achieved anything: that they are going to college on some sort of technical walkover.
When the dust settles on downgrading and disappointment, that’s the issue we will be left with. This year has had a devastating effect on mental health, but surely no group has had to endure as many trials as the Leaving Cert students. Now, they face into college – a time that should be the best of their young lives – on the back foot; feeling like imposters in universities where the older students had to endure the ordeal of Leaving Cert exams. Worse, they’ll be entering their new environments largely on screens, unable to share their feelings and experiences with their new classmates, destined to remain – quite literally – virtual strangers. There will be no outpourings over chips in the canteen and pints in the bar. At a time when young adults traditionally step away from their parents, there will be no minding them. And God knows they are going to need a lot of minding.
IN the end, Friday was a good day in our house. From about 11.30am, her friends were receiving their CAO offers by text and email. My daughter’s phone and email remained resolutely silent. I checked on Twitter: sure enough, the whole country seemed to have their offers. She started panicking that she hadn’t hit a button, completed an instruction, anything that would explain the silence. Family members started phoning to see what she’d got. If you’d seen our walls, you’d have spotted herself and myself, right up them.
Finally, the portal proper opened on the CAO website and there it was: her first choice. Through relief and joy, we cried. And only much later did we discuss getting her a new phone.
It has been an extraordinary time, and in the end, I’m not sure that the Department of Education and all involved in getting the Class of 2020 to college could have done better. But we’ve spent years speculating about replacing the Leaving Cert and in the year we were finally obliged to do it, the deep, damaging flaws of a system that judges success and failure of young people on their performance across 14 days instead of 14 years was wretchedly exposed. Surely, that is the real lesson we need to learn in whatever uncertain future we face.