Opinion: We need a Roosevelt-style New Deal for Irish schools

Proposals for curriculum renewal in our post-primary schools have reached a troublesome impasse, mainly on the issue of assessment. Like practitioners in all fields, teachers need to become proficient and sure-footed in handling new developments in professional practice. In many countries teachers have become highly accomplished in variants of continuous assessment. The research on these strongly suggests initiatives are best introduced where they can be closely monitored by practitioners as well as by more specialised evaluators. Improvements and additional safeguards can thus be incorporated in unhasty, co-operative ways: far from the “high stakes” end of the practice as it were.

Like the Inter Cert before it, the Junior Cert often serves as a nursery of bad learning habits, which then become more ingrained through the Leaving Cert and the points system. This nexus curtails the development of students’ capacities as independent learners, but also as co-operative learners.

Points system ill effects

The 1999 report of the commission on the points system highlighted its many flaws but still recommended its retention, with some changes. What it failed to point out with sufficient clarity was that if the points system were to remain, its ill effects could be greatly reduced if the exam assessment system rewarded a wider range of achievements and capabilities; so a high points score might thus be the mark of a range of proven research skills and a capacity for independent learning.

There are many forms of assessment in educational practice, including self-assessment, peer assessment, assessment for feedback and assessment for certification.

In relation to that last one, a common but crucial ambiguity needs clarification. The purposes of assessment for certification are obscured if teachers assess their own students. By contrast, they are properly served if teachers assess the work of their students and if there are clear safeguards to ensure: (a) that such work is the student’s own work, undertaken under properly supervised conditions; (b) that the completed work is assessed using appropriate learning criteria; (c) that the marked work is placed on record for objective scrutiny by examiners, internal and external.

Electronic systems such as Moodle can facilitate such assessment. A resolution to this assessment issue, with beneficial consequences for how the points system works, could finally open up many productive possibilities for post-primary education that have long been blocked.

For a satisfactory outcome to the current acrimony, however, changes in the assessment system need to be considered in connection with other things needed to equip Ireland’s teachers for 21st-century education. I mean something bolder and more visionary than a package of measures that would fix individual problems.

What’s called for is a New Deal for teaching in Ireland. Franklin D Roosevelt’s path-breaking initiative closed the curtain on the United States depression era with a newly conceived allocation of material resources but also provided a major emotional and psychological impetus, releasing new energies and aspirations for a better future.

Educational developments

Some educational developments with potential are already under way in Ireland: a statutory curriculum council that guards against arbitrary pendulum swings when a government changes; an inspectorate progressively seeking to build capacities for critical self-evaluation; a restructured teacher education that aims to make teachers their own most constructive critics; not least, a statutory teaching council that gives the profession the decisive say on a code of values and conduct for teachers, and on who is to be deemed fit to teach and who is not.

Developments such as these need to be joined by ideas to redress the material inequities of the reign of austerity – specifically, pay scales that are equitable and a career structure supporting the phased nature of a teaching career.

Third, educational research can contribute here some fertile ideas that spring from a vision of teaching as a learning profession par excellence: teachers as discerning and collaborative authors of their own work; time in school as a judicious balance between the activities that constitute teaching; professional development as a responsibility for self-renewal and as a right to well-resourced, imaginative support programmes; and assessment in its more developed forms as an inherent feature of professional practice.

Embracing such challenges could ensure Ireland’s learning environments are second to none. Failure to do so would mean reneging on the educational strengths for which our country is noted.

Pádraig Hogan is a teacher and researcher in the education department at Maynooth University