Education expert: ‘We need to plan to replace next year’s Leaving Certificate’

Academic calls for single US-style multiple choice exam to determine Irish students’ college places

A LEADING education expert says he ‘doubts very much’ that next year’s Leaving Certificate exams will take place.

Dr Kevin Williams of the Centre for Evaluation, Quality & Inspection at Dublin City University says the calculated grades system has been ‘too much of blunt instrument’ and there needs to be a better system in place for next year.

Dr Williams, an author and former president of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland, says the Department of Education would be best introducing a three-hour, multiple-choice examination similar to the SAT test which determines all college entries in the United States.

It comes as a language teacher in a Deis school in west Dublin confirmed to the MoS that none of the grades awarded to her students by the school in her subjects, French and Spanish, were downgraded.

A Deis school is one with high concentrations of students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds

This contrasts with the Institute of Education, a private school in Dublin city centre, which said 96% of its pupils had their school marks downgraded by the Department of Education.

This school and several other private schools have complained of a bias against socially advantaged schools, as the Government sought to avoid the controversy in the UK where disadvantaged students were discriminated against.

Dr Williams says private schools have reason to be concerned.

‘The calculated grades system has been a rather blunt instrument – perhaps it could have been nuanced to capture situations like that in the Deutsche Schule.

‘But bear in mind that native speakers of a language may not be of H1 standard in the Leaving Cert because of the emphasis on written assessment and the profile of knowledge of grammar in these assessments.

‘With the current health crisis, I very much doubt the Leaving Certificate will happen next year and I think the department should be looking at something like the SATs to ensure the highest level of objectivity,

‘In this era of uncertainty, it would be timely to consider the use of SATs customised for Ireland to determine college entry in the future.’

The calculated grades system has been widely criticised since the Leaving Certificate results came out on Monday.

Just weeks before the results were due, Minister for Education Norma Foley said a school’s performance in the Leaving Cert over 2017-19 would not be used to predict what the class of 2020 would have achieved.

It followed a climbdown in different regions of the UK over ‘school profiling’, the process by which students from schools that didn’t achieve highly in the past ended up being downgraded.

However, since the results were released on Monday, there have been complaints from schools and students, notably in the fee-charging and ‘grind school’ sectors, that the marks from their teachers have been wrongly lowered, in the process of national standardisation.

The principal of the Germanspeaking secondary school, St Killian’s in Clonskeagh, Co. Dublin, said the results her school received bore no relationship to the ability, past performance or calculated mark awarded to the students.

In an open letter to the department, she asks:

■ How come some students awarded the same calculated mark can be given two entirely different grades where there is a deviation of two grade levels?

■ How come students given a calculated mark mid-way through a grade range can be downgraded by one, or in some cases two, grade levels?

■ How come mother tongue students were downgraded from a H1 to H2 or in some cases a H3?

The teacher we spoke to from the Deis school in west Dublin says her pupils are among some of the most socially disadvantaged in the country.

‘I have two girls in particular in my class who were always going to do brilliantly – they work really hard. They were delighted with their grades.

‘But the other students were mostly very happy, too.

‘I think the department seems to have gone more or less from the

‘Calculated grades has been a blunt instrument’

grades with Deis schools, so there wouldn’t be a furore over class distinctions.’

Deputy Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, Labour Party spokesman on education, said if some students were discriminated against, that needs to be immediately reversed.

‘We in the Labour Party were absolutely adamant that there should be no discrimination against disadvantaged schools.

‘If the reverse seems to have happened and private schools were discriminated against, then the Minister for Education has to reverse that.’

Meanwhile, Dr Williams says that some of the private schools’ reactions to the calculated grades strike a somewhat hypocritical tone.

‘The mission statements of many private schools claim to have outreach to the disadvantaged, and to embrace the “option for the poor”.

‘Yes, the students have done less well than they expected but students from disadvantaged schools have done better.

‘But this should be a cause for celebration by the private schools.