Cabinet ‘ kept in dark’ over grades f iasco

CABINET ministers and Leaving Certificate students were ‘kept in the dark’ over the calculated grades errors, it has been claimed.

Si nn Féin’s Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire said there was a ‘striking’ lack of clarity over exactly who knew what and when about the errors in the system.

Mr Ó Laoghaire claimed that not only had Leaving Cert students been kept in the dark, but it appeared Cabinet ministers had too.

It emerged on Wednesday that computer coding errors in this year’s Leaving Cert exams grading system had left some 6,500 students with at least one grade lower than they should have received last month.

It means that up to 1,000 extra college places could be needed. Mr Ó Laoghaire questioned why Education Minister Norma Foley did not inform her Cabinet colleagues on Tuesday about the errors. ‘This is not academic, this affects the lives and futures of students,’ he told the Dáil. Mr Ó Laoghaire described the issue as a ‘shambles’ and that what was needed now was an ‘absolute guarantee’ every student who missed out on a college course would be offered a place. In response, Green Party leader Eamon Ryan made a commitment on behalf of the Government that no student would ‘lose out’ on a college place due to the error. Taking Leaders’ Questions yesterday, he said he was first informed of the error last Friday but that at the time there was ‘only an initial sense of where the difficulty might be’. ‘I was fully informed and fully briefed on Monday in advance of a leaders meeting where we discussed it at length,’ Mr Ryan said.

He added: ‘There was no intention to keep anyone in the dark. There was an intention in trying to get this right so that those students, that the... anguish to them, was minimised and I think that was the right approach.’

Mr O Laoghaire said: ‘This has real implications. And what might seem small on a spreadsheet is very significant in terms of the error that it was. You talk about no intention of keeping anyone in the dark. But people were kept in the dark.’

He added that he could not understand why Mr Ryan had not raised the matter at Cabinet on Tuesday when he was aware of it.

‘One of the greatest challenges that this Government and the previous government faced over the course of the last number of months, and you decided it shouldn’t be discussed at Cabinet? There’s no logic to that, Minister,’ he said.

In reply, Mr Ryan said Ms Foley and Higher Education Minister Simon Harris were working on ‘sorting out the issue’ and getting to a stage where we had ‘final detail on estimated numbers, what the solution would be’.

‘We wanted to get that right and we will get it right,’ he said.

Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín described the calculated grades error as a ‘fiasco’.

‘The predictive grades process has turned out to be a dog’s dinner. What’s actually delivered looks nothing like what was actually designed in the first place.’

‘It has turned out to be a dog’s dinner’