THERE was panic for half an hour in secondary schools yesterday when a letter from the Department of Education arrived saying Leaving Certificate oral exams in Irish and modern languages would take place a month earlier than scheduled.
The Department was inundated with calls from anguished principals and language teachers asking what was going on. The answer was that there had been an unfortunate clerical error", according to a Department spokesman.
Instead of sending out this year's dates, the Department had sent out last year's letter announcing that the oral exams in Irish, French, German, Spanish and Italian would take place between March 15th and 29th.
In fact, as earlier Department circulars in October and December had made clear, this year's orals will be between April 14th and 25th.
The Department spokesman said the error had been spotted within 24 hours and corrected letters had been sent to schools immediately.
Language teachers who phoned The Irish Times were not impressed. "There was absolute panic for 20 minutes until we got a phone call through to the Department," said one teacher at Bruce College in Dublin. "There must have been the same panic in schools throughout the country."
An executive member of the French Teachers Association, Ms Anne Nevin, who did not receive the incorrect letter, said this year's oral tests would make up a higher percentage of the marks in the Leaving Certificate modern languages exams than previously.