Rebecca gets a grade-A welcome
DETERMINED student Rebecca Carter was greeted with flowers, a welcome banner and cheers as she began her first day of veterinary studies in UCD yesterday.
Ms Carter, who won a High Court case forcing the State Exams Commission to expedite a review of her Leaving Cert results, told waiting reporters that ‘I feel like everyone’s going to know who I am and I don’t know anybody’, joking she might straighten her distinctive curly hair to blend in.
Despite starting the course almost a month late, the Wexford bright spark’s boyfriend, a second-year vet student, will help her catch up with course work. She said: ‘I’m happy that all of this can come to an end and hopefully I’ll be happier in the months to come.’
Yesterday, Micheál O’Higgins SC, for Ms Carter, gave Judge Richard Humphreys an update on the case. Mr O’Higgins said: ‘The appeal was successful. Her business studies grade was increased from H2 to H1.
‘On foot of that, she was offered a place at UCD, and I understand she commenced it this morning.’
Judge Humphreys replied: ‘That’s great news.’
Conor Power SC, for the State Exams Commission, said he did not yet have instructions from his client as to whether it was planning to appeal the judgment.
IF Rebecca Carter had not checked her Leaving Cert exam papers, she wouldn’t have found the sloppy error that had cost her ten marks and potentially denied her the place in the college course she wanted so badly.
And if she hadn’t challenged the State Examinations Commission, when she was told that its red tape meant she’d have to wait six weeks for the result of her appeal, she’d have missed out on a year of her studies, of her career, of the future she’d worked so hard to secure.
A desperately determined young woman’s efforts and awesome dedication – she repeated the Leaving Cert, and even learned the biology course from scratch, all by herself – would have been flung back in her face. And the culprit for this injustice would have been the very education system that ought to have the welfare of students as its priority.
Solution
Instead, from all that we’ve learned from Rebecca’s case it would appear it is the interests of teachers and examiners, not the welfare of their students, that our system has been designed to ensure.
The appeal couldn’t have been fasttracked because there are only 400 examiners available to handle some 9,000 appeals. And because they’re all full-time teachers who are back at work by the time the appeals process begins, they can only do the re-checks in their spare time... for which they’re paid extra on top of their salaries. And the appeals process can only kick in after the Leaving Cert results are published in mid-August. And the Leaving Cert results cannot be published before mid-August because just 1,700 of the State’s 27,000 secondary school teachers work on correcting the exams. In 54 days they get through 390,000 scripts, earning up to €30 per paper. In the course of their very generously paid holidays, then, secondary teachers can earn thousands of euro correcting exam papers, but only if they wish to apply for the work.
Many can’t be bothered, though, as several teachers told their annual conferences earlier this year. They reckon that giving up a couple of weeks of their 198 days off to net around €3,000 for correcting exam scripts just isn’t worth their while. So finding teachers willing and able to correct exam scripts is an annual headache for the SEC. One of the most important tasks of the entire education process, in other words, is reduced to the status of a nixer, a perk, a favour.
Yesterday, in this newspaper, a reader’s letter to the editor suggested a blindingly obvious solution to this costly inefficiency: get teachers to correct the Leaving Cert exam papers. Make exam correction a part of the secondary teachers’ duties, to be completed before they begin their holidays. As reader Denis Dennehy pointed out, ‘the 12 weeks-plus holidays in second-level schools were intended for the benefit of the children and not the adult teachers, who should be well capable of working another three or four weeks to correct the Junior and Leaving Cert exam papers, and still have up to eight weeks’ extended holidays, the same as their primary school colleagues’.
Teacher unions are currently agitating for ‘pay restoration’, which basically means elevating post-2011 teaching recruits to the level of their older colleagues. The Croke Park deal basically hung new recruits out to dry while protecting the pay and conditions of existing public-sector staff – supposedly in return for increased efficiencies. Well, here is a glaring inefficiency that any government with the backbone to stand up to a powerful and primarily self-interested lobby group would have rectified years ago.
Disbelief
Education Minister Richard Bruton should make it clear any budge on pay comes with the condition that teachers’ duties will be inclusive of correcting the State exams. It would be a move that, given the huge sympathy for Rebecca Carter and general disbelief at the absurdities of the system over which the SEC was happy to preside, would attract strong public support. And not only would it speed up the correcting process, it would reduce mistakes by ensuring teachers corrected their own specialities, and allow ample time for a fair and thorough appeals process.
On the basis of different governments’ track records in taking on the public-sector unions, though, the prospect of any such sane and sensible solution is very dim indeed. Thanks to the weakness of successive administrations, our publicsector pay is up to 40% higher than that of the private sector. In the UK, that disparity is just 1%. While the average public-sector worker in Britain earns €592 per week, the average weekly salary in our public sector is €959. The boom is getting boomier, all the economic indicators suggest, and the ESRI last week doubled its growth rate predictions for our GDP this year. But if you’re wondering why the effects of all this prosperity don’t seem to be trickling down, one explanation points the finger at the Government’s willingness to indulge public-sector pay demands. This is despite the fact that the Government has a duty to make sure that public funds are spent for the benefit of everyone, not just those State employees with the most muscular unions.
Incompetent
Since the recovery began in 2014, more than half of all the extra money spent on the public sector has gone on pay hikes. The public-sector pay and pensions bill to the State increased by some €2.3billion in the three years up to 2017.
Private-sector workers still live in dread of redundancy, which never has to trouble even the most incompetent of public servants here. And the hard-pressed private-sector employees, who are wondering when they’re likely to feel the ‘boominess’ of the new boom, can only look enviously at the public sector’s guaranteed pension pots, well-paid holidays and optional perks such as exam correction. Can you imagine your average privatesector worker turning their nose up at the chance to earn a few thousand euro for giving up a fraction of their holidays? Especially if they still had 16 weeks of paid leave left to take? Secondary teachers work 167 days a year, leaving a massive 28 weeks of days off to enjoy.
Our uncommonly long school holidays date from a time when rural children were needed on the farm, at busy times such as summer and spring. The rationale for keeping them that length is that children need longer breaks and more holidays than grown-ups. But, as Mr Dennehy pointed out in his letter, that doesn’t mean adults should benefit from this consideration, and expecting them to correct the State exams – the purpose and pinnacle of all their efforts in the classroom – is hardly too great an ask.
Nobody’s denying that teachers work hard. So do nurses and gardaí, but they don’t get 28 weeks off with full pay every year. They’ve done a great job of clinging to this privilege but it is time to review it. When such a huge proportion of revenue is going into public-sector pockets, rather than on front-line services, a courageous political initiative is long overdue.
In light of the gross inefficiencies shown up by the Rebecca Carter case, will Minister Bruton demand that every teacher corrects their share of exams, a task that shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks when divided among almost 27,000 teachers? Or will he take the easy route of throwing your tax money at the teachers to coax them to do what, by right, should be their job? Have a wild guess.