Eilis O’Hanlon

For once, usual winners didn’t take it all

THROUGHOUT my time in sixth form college in Belfast in the 1980s, studying for my A Levels, I was applying for jobs. I didn’t get any of them.

Had I done so, I might never have gone to university at all. No one would have thought less of me for it. People of my background, and from a school like mine, weren’t expected to continue on to third-level education. Of the girls in my year, just three of us went to university.

I didn’t even know for a long time how to apply for courses. Those who went to more academic schools understood how the system worked. To me, it was a mysterious alchemy, and the world would not have noticed in the slightest had I followed a different path.

It’s still the same for children from working-class families. The numbers who go to college or university have increased gradually over time, but it’s still not assumed that they will end up there in the same way it is for middle-class children, who’ve had decades of a head-start and are primed for academic achievement from day one.

This year, it’s the latter students who are feeling disappointment because the system has put them at a disadvantage, after the Leaving Cert results saw students from private and grind schools doing worse than usual compared with others whose parents couldn’t afford to pay the fees for certain schools.

From tomorrow, when teachers’ predicted grades are released, and the mismatch between expectation and reality is more starkly exposed, the volume of complaints is bound to soar.

Of course, there’s no such thing as an exam system which is fair to everyone. Some people always miss out, whether it’s those who go to pieces on the day after years of knuckling down, or those who just don’t respond well to the learning-by-rote nature of the Leaving Cert. It’s heartbreaking.

It is also probably unfair on students in fee-paying schools who’ve been downgraded. For obvious reasons, students whose families can afford to send them to the best-performing schools do get better grades than everyone else. That’s what their parents are paying for, after all.

If the calculated grades had simply been based on past performance, then they would have sailed through to full points as usual and be heading off in confidence to do next whatever it’s been drilled into them to see as their birthright.

Instead, through no fault of their own, the grades were worked out differently in this strangest of years, leading them to be the ones who miss out for a change.

They’re distraught. It’s only natural. Not all parents who send their children to fee-paying schools are rolling in money. Many make huge sacrifices to pay for it, and this year the gamble didn’t pay off.

It must feel for them as if the coping classes have been screwed again for political expediency, simply in order to avoid the same wave of affront which swept across the UK where it was gifted pupils in disadvantaged areas who saw their estimated grades slashed.

Some of the individual cases which have been highlighted across Ireland in the past seven days are equally unjust, and it’s no wonder that many schools and individual students are having recourse to legal action to challenge flaws in the standardisation process.

It could be that the Government will be found to have erred on the side of panic after what happened in the UK, tweaking the algorithm too far in the opposite direction.

The tools used were necessarily blunter than usual this year. The system was hardly without deeprooted defects to begin with, though, and it may be that the fractures have simply been laid bare after years of being papered over.

There has always been a comforting myth of meritocracy, of equal opportunity. We liked to think everyone had the same chance if they were bright enough and worked hard, but it was never really true.

Entrance to third level for those from economically deprived backgrounds may be higher in Ireland than in many other countries, including Germany and France, and that’s worth celebrating. But those students don’t always get into the top courses at the best universities. So the underlying inequality was merely concealed, and slowly, surely perpetuated.

Strong-minded individuals have always found a way to push past those barriers. That doesn’t mean the barriers aren’t still there. Those from poorer backgrounds have never been competing on a level playing field.

As a report on educational inequality and disadvantage, published by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Education last year, put it: “Young people from less affluent backgrounds are destined to struggle and lack access to opportunities and outcomes that are freely available to those from more affluent communities.”

After taking submissions from multiple sources, the committee was left in no doubt that “the consequences of this are stark”. That should have been obvious all along from mere observation.

Better-off children have the benefit of extra tuition, grinds, out-of-school activities such as Gaeltacht camps and other cultural activities. They can afford books, computers. They may have warmer, quieter homes in which to study.

Every one per cent increase in income brings about an increased performance in education many multiples of that single percentage. More than that, they grow up with a culture of expectation whose value goes beyond money.

Going to a school reunion some years ago, I was struck by how much it still rankled with the girls in my year that university had never even been presented to them as a possibility. They’d been written off.

One was hugely proud that her own child — “the son of a dunce”, as she put it — was about to graduate.

Finding a solution to these structural inequalities is harder. The Education Committee talked vaguely of how “public policies need to actively promote equality of condition, economically and socially, outside of schools and colleges so that there can be more equality of outcome within schools”.

That’s easier said than done. Economic inequalities in society are stubbornly resistant to change, and, if this year has bucked the trend slightly, it was only by accident, not design.

Ultimately, it probably won’t make a difference to the long-term social and economic prospects of those who are already starting out with the most advantages.

They may be forced this year to take a more winding route to get where they want to get. Whether that’s by sitting the exams whenever Covid-19 allows or appealing the grades in whatever limited form is available to meet their concerns.

They may even do what worse-off students do every year, which is to just accept places on less sought-after courses rather than their first choices — but the likelihood is that they’ll still end up sitting at the top of the socio-economic heap down the line.

Even if, years from now, 2020 stands out as the one time when privilege couldn’t open every door, and students from working-class backgrounds had a taste of the good life educationally, the old order in which it’s where you live, and what school you attended, and who you know that really matters, will reassert itself soon enough.

For now, let the less well off enjoy turning the tables for once. Getting to university is a bigger deal for many students than those who have grown up simply expecting to get there can ever possibly understand.

‘There’s no such thing as an exam system that is fair to all. Some students will always miss out’