Department to appeal tribunal's dyslexia ruling

The Department of Education is to appeal a decision by the Equality Tribunal that could have far-reaching implications for up to 5,000 students sitting State exams each year.

In a decision published yesterday the tribunal ruled that two former Leaving Certificate students with dyslexia had been discriminated against because annotations were added to their results certificates. The department was ordered to pay each €6,000.

The cases, which were supported by the Equality Authority, concerned two girls from the east of the State who sat the Leaving Cert in 2001. They did not know each other and these were separate cases, decided on together.

The tribunal found they were disadvantaged by the department because added to their certificates were footnotes saying: "All parts of the examination in this subject were assessed except for the spelling and some grammatical elements."

The department was also ordered to issue each young woman with a new Leaving Cert without the annotations and to investigate the feasibility of creating and implementing a system to take into account the individual needs of students applying for accommodation.

Responding to the ruling, the department said it needed "legal clarity" on the ruling.

Minister for Education Mary Hanafin said she would ask the State Examinations Commission to "re-examine policy and practice in this area".

A spokeswoman said the department was concerned that the widening of access through providing exemptions and annotations was not fully understood in the cases and that the findings were "potentially far reaching", given the call for the implementation of a system to take the individual needs of students applying for accommodation into account.

Ann Hughes, director of the Dyslexia Association of Ireland, said she and her colleagues were "very pleased with the ruling".

"We would have had a lot of hurt and ill-feeling among students, parents and teachers about this policy of putting an endorsement on the certificates of dyslexic students who got reasonable accommodation in sitting their exams.

"We have always felt that by making reasonable accommodation for dyslexic students, the department was removing the disadvantage they faced, but by putting these endorsements on their certificates, they were reimposing a disadvantage."

She said between 6 and 8 per cent of the population were dyslexic and that last year 1,396 dyslexic students were granted "reasonable accommodation" in sitting their Leaving Cert, while 3,367 dyslexic students were so accommodated at Junior Cert.

The manner in which their results certificates were endorsed depended on the type of reasonable accommodations made.

The complainants had argued the annotation of their certificates implied the students had not actually merited the results they had achieved.

Reasonable accommodation: how it works
The form of "reasonable accommodation" provided to a dyslexic student is decided on a case-by-case basis. Among the provisions made are the provision of a reader, a scribe, a tape-recorder, a spelling and/grammar waiver or the provision of a separate examination centre, such as a separate room in the school.