PRIVATE SCHOOLS: ‘VICTIMS OF BIAS’
Fears over flood of Leaving Cert legal cases
MORE than two in three private-school students have missed out on their desired college course as they claim calculated grading subjected them to unfair bias.
Fears of a flood of legal cases are growing as the fee-paying Institute of Education in Dublin warned the Taoiseach that students would be forced to ‘exercise their legal rights including recourse to the courts’.
Barrister John Temple told the Irish Daily Mail he expects to be inundated with calls on Monday. He warned: ‘There are parents who are willing to throw the money at it. They have the means, more than other people do. That is something that the Department should
take into consideration.’
It comes as a survey conducted by Studyclix.ie, which received over 1,000 responses between 2pm and 4pm yesterday, revealed that a majority (69%) of private school students said they didn’t receive their first choice on the CAO.
And 57% said they were considering appealing, while 6% said they were considering legal action.
Minister for Higher Education Simon Harris declined to comment on the threat of future legal cases at a press conference yesterday but said that while some students will be disappointed ‘we’re at the best place now that we could’ve been’.
The principal of the private grinds school, The Institute of Education, Yvonne O’Toole, said 44% of her students’ grades were reduced.
In the weeks leading up to the release of the calculated grades, a school’s past performance was removed from the standardisation process used to determine grades, which Ms O’Toole claims changed the ‘entire game’ for her students.
Speaking on Newstalk yesterday, Ms O’Toole said that 96% of their students had their grades reduced which impacted their CAO offers.
She said that they brought in a statistical analysis company which found 44% of her school’s grades had been reduced compared to a national average of 17%.
‘This morning, students are traumatised,’ she said. ‘They’re distraught, they’re overwhelmed and we felt we had to speak out in relation to this. This is all schools, any high-achieving schools throughout the country. This is basically an overachieving school. Our students here achieve very high grades, every single year, like many other schools, and they were pushed into a norm and that was very unfair.’
She said that every year her Leaving Cert students consistently outperform the national average.
‘For example, last year we had 27% of H1s in French. This year it went down to 15%, even though the national average increased – that’s actually scandalous,’ Ms O’Toole fumed.
According to the Studyclix.ie survey, the 69% of private school students who said they didn’t get their first choice course in the CAO firstround offers compares starkly with the 48% of public school students.
In addition, the survey also found that 57% of all students are considering appealing at least one of their calculated grades with 6% saying that they are currently considering legal action.
Speaking on the results of the survey, secondary school teacher and founder of Studyclix.ie Luke Saunders said: ‘There has been a lot of talk in the media this week that students in certain private schools were penalised unfairly by the calculated grades system. I would not be too quick to attribute the higher number of private school students not getting their firstchoice course solely on this.
‘From looking at data in previous years, there is evidence that many students in private schools will target higher points courses and so a higher percentage of those not getting their course would not be unheard of,’ he said.
Parents and students besieged RTÉ’s Liveline radio show yesterday to vent their anger and hit out at the Government for lowering predicted grades by teachers.
Fabiola Dumitru, 19, from the Institute of Education, told the Irish Daily Mail she only got her tenth course choice on her CAO list, as a result of being downgraded. She said: ‘I am not happy with them at all. I got 476 points and I was aiming a lot higher because I studied so much and put so much effort into everything.’
Ms Dumitru is a fluent Spanish speaker and was expecting a H1 – the top grade – but only received a H2. In addition, despite being a straight H1 student in biology, which she described as her passion, she only got a H2.
She said that she had studied hard and took a lot of grinds but her work was not reflected in her final grades. All her top
choices were in the fields of medicine, pharmacy and science but she didn’t get any of them.
‘I got my tenth option, which is economics and sociology. Personally I don’t have a huge interest in studying that,’ she said. ‘My parents aren’t rich… I don’t feel like we’ve been treated correctly. Just because we go to a private school doesn’t mean we are buying our way into university.
‘We still have to study and work as hard as everybody else.
‘I don’t know what to do. I was so excited to go to college.’
Speaking to the Mail, father Owen Delaney, whose son James attended the Institute, said that there seems to be a ‘muted uproar’ over this issue, warning ‘I think it will grow unless it is addressed’.
‘I am trying to understand how when they took the school ranking out of the algorithm, surely there was a data analyst somewhere that would have thought that this would likely impact the grind schools, for example,’ he said.
‘If it goes to the court, which it looks like if it is not addressed, it will [and] the courts will look at it purely on the balance of fairness. I think there is a case there.’
Speaking to the Mail, barrister John Temple, who specialises in data protection, said that a lot of parents ‘are holding off till Monday to see the difference in the predictive grades and the alignment grades’. He said: ‘I imagine that is when a lot more parents and schools are going to start making phone calls to people like me.’
Mr Temple added we are in ‘very uncharted territory’ when it comes to the legal process of this issue.
‘Nobody seems to know what is going to happen or what is not going to happen,’ he said.
‘You are going to have to ask the question, are private-paying students being penalised?’ he said.
‘There are parents who are willing to throw the money at it.’
Minister for Further and Higher
Education Simon Harris defended the system yesterday, saying it was as ‘fair and robust as it can be’.
‘It is not lost on me that we have put measures in place to protect those who are the most disadvantaged and as a result we are having questions about fee-paying schools that perhaps wouldn’t normally be asked during a Leaving Cert year,’ he said. ‘Had we left the school profiling element in, it may have made my job easier to do, but it would have been the wrong thing to do. What we did instead was increase the number of places.’
Sinn Féin TD Rose Conway-Walsh said yesterday that many hardworking students have been let down by the Government. She cited cases of students who deferred going to college for a year being disadvantaged by the calculated grades system bumping up the points for many courses.
‘Substantial increases in entrance points will mean many students will not get the courses that they want. Prior Leaving Cert students will be particularly disadvantaged,’ she said.
‘The results are in on the Government’s management of the CAO process and they have clearly failed.’
A Department of Education spokesman last night said the new grades system is ‘blind to [the] type of school or education centre by which the estimated grades were provided for students’. ronan.smyth@dailymail.ie
‘Results are in... the Government failed’