This crisis shows us why it’s time to reform Leaving Cert

IS IT time to reform the Leaving Certificate examination?

I believe it is. The creation of predictive grades as a remedy for not being able to find a way to orchestrate a socially distanced Leaving Certificate this year is the greatest opportunity we were ever handed to reform the assessment. The predictive grades solution simply perpetuates the innate cruelty of our outdated final school examination process.

In effect, the Government is saying that it cannot find a way to have 60,000-plus Leaving Cert students sit their exams this summer in a socially distanced way.

So how on earth are we going to reopen schools and colleges for over 900,000 primary and secondary school pupils in September?

Why, with all our of wisdom and technology in 2020, can we not properly engineer a matriculation educational process which will cherish all of our young people equally to play their adult roles within a post-Covidean society?

Our Leaving Certificate is a relic of an outdated 19th-century educational approach.

Why are students in 2020 being compelled to sit exams with paper and pen, when most of them are extremely computer-literate? Surely there must be another way to assess the talents of our young people in the 21st century?

For generations, the Leaving Certificate has largely failed to respect and applaud the talents of many of our citizens, many of whom are now the gallant front-line warriors of Covid-19. We have all now realised that these individuals, many of whom lost out in the CAO points race, are actually the very life blood of our society.

We need to put an end to the Leaving Certificate examination process in its current form forthwith, because it remains akin to the educational “murdering machine” which Pádraig Pearse condemned in the early 20th century.

Generational-changing pandemics offer the opportunity to fast-forward reform in many ways – let us grasp this catalytic chance and reform the Leaving Cert.

Is mise le meas, stay safe and take care. Paul Horan School of Nursing & Midwifery

Trinity College, Dublin