Demands grow for Leaving Cert clarity
DEMANDS are growing for full clarity in how the calculated grades model will be used in the Leaving Certificate.
As students await their results in the coming weeks, Sinn Féin has asked: ‘What is there to hide?’ – and demanded that the model be published for parents and pupils.
This follows a U-turn by the North’s Education Minister Peter Weir to move away from centralised standardisation to teachers’ estimates; around 11,000 grades were downgraded from teachers’ estimates last week.
Sinn Féin education spokesman Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire said students and parents are worried about what happened in England, Scotland, Wales and the North.
‘There is a keen sense of injustice that students have their results downgraded because of who they were, because of where they were from and because of the school that they went to and the past results that existed there,’ he said.
‘What we have in this jurisdiction is a huge concern that those issues could be replicated. I wrote to the Minister for Education [Norma Foley] two months ago asking for the model to be published. I was told it wouldn’t be published until after results were given. So the question has to be asked, what is there to hide?
‘Why would the standardisation model, the school profiling model, not be published?’
He said the model needs to be scrapped if it contains the same flaws and weaknesses as those seen in Britain and the North. Ms Foley has said her department is examining what has happened in the UK regarding calculated grades and learning from their experience. She also said the weightings here are different to those in the UK, and that the model will be published after the process has run its course