Battling on to build a new, more modern Leaving Cert exam

The media may be sceptical but Anne Looney, head of the group which advises the Minister for Education on exam and other issues, says the Leaving Certificate will be radically revised reports Louise Holden

Hands up who loves the Leaving Certificate? Well, somebody must because despite the annual laments of teachers, parents and students, the creaky old system is hanging in there.

Last April the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) put before the Minister for Education its proposal for the overhaul of the Leaving Certificate only to be told that the proposals represented "change for change's sake" and "a Rolls Royce option". Apart from rumblings about staggering the exam timetable, has the Minister any plans for real reform?

"It's unfortunate that the media....consigned the NCCA proposals to the scrapheap," says NCCA chief executive Anne Looney. "They followed one of the most extensive consultation processes ever undertaken on a set of education proposals. The Minister's response was completely misinterpreted and gave the public the impression that the proposed reforms were off the table. In fact, she took many of the recommendations on board and there is significant change in the pipeline. Just before Christmas the Council approved a comprehensive programme for the development of the 'new' senior cycle and the work is underway."

According to Looney, Minister Hanafin has charged her curriculum advisory body with fine tuning large sections of the proposal for further consideration. Curriculum overhaul by 2010 may have been ambitious, but big changes are coming, says Looney.

Under the proposed new system students will be offered short courses in complementary subjects such as European studies, enterprise education, sports studies and science and society. Students will also have access to a series of "transition units" based on the current transition year programme, which can be taken consecutively throughout fourth year or spread out over a two- or three-year senior cycle.

"The Minister has indicated that her preference is to continue with the existing transition year format of one standalone year, but she has asked that we take a look at the particular needs of disadvantaged schools, and how they might make best use of transition units when the separate transition year is not in their interests," Looney explains.

Recent research from Emer Quinn, Delma Byrne and Carmel Hannan at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) suggests that students at risk of leaving school early may be more inclined to do so if they are required to take a three-year senior cycle with transition year (ESRI 2004). The new system would offer students the chance to take a two-year senior cycle with some transition units included.

Another proposal that found favour with the Department of Education was the idea of scaling back the breadth of current subject offerings. In her response to the NCCA, the Minister said that she welcomed the idea of reducing the content of current disciplines and "redressing the balance between knowledge and the acquisition of specific skills. The identification of three skills to be particularly developed in each subject and the organisation of subjects into smaller units producing defined outcomes is something which I also welcome."

The NCCA has suggested that traditional Leaving Certificate syllabuses are overcrowded and balanced in favour of knowledge, rather than skills. The council is currently working on redesigning syllabus for the each of the nine language subjects, the five science subjects and the two maths subjects with an eye to reducing overall content and "embedding" training in six "key skills" including critical thinking, communication and personal effectiveness. This first phase of subject review will be ready for consultation in January 2007.

"We have been asked to give this process priority," says Looney. "The current syllabuses are so crowded, students get very little time to think about what they are learning. This is causing problems at third level, where students are required to work independently, but have not had much experience of this at second level."

The NCCA will also be taking a serious look at Irish and at whether every student should be required to take the same course. "Our review of Leaving Certificate Irish will involve more than tweaking," Looney warns.

One of the key goals of the NCCA proposal, says Looney, is to ensure that every student is offered a broad range of academic and vocational subjects to reverse the current ghettoisation of subject provision. The Leaving Certificate Vocational (LCV) and Leaving Certificate Applied (LCA) programmes are not widely available despite their progressive curriculums. The council is examining ways that individual LCA modules could be made accessible to a wider audience.

The provision of short courses, some of which will be available for review next January, is also designed to offer a different menu of learning for different types of student.

"The idea behind the short courses is not to squeeze in more vocational modules for the 'non-traditional' student, but to provide students of all abilities with a wider learning experience," Looney insists. "For those students of high academic ability, the chance to take a course in 'science and society' or mathematical applications may provide just the challenge they're looking for. For those students fed up with the current offering and on the verge of dropping out, the lure of sport studies or drama and theatre studies might entice them to hang on.

"For students who need motivation, the idea of getting a course finished in one year has an appeal. But I would be keen to say that we need to move carefully on this. We can't just launch these into the system without careful preparation. I would be keen to look at the whole idea of e-learning for some short courses, so that students might be able to access a course that they wanted to take, but the school could not offer. As it stands, schools can expect to have access to transition units online as early as this September."

Right now, according to Looney, the trick is to preserve those elements of the existing Leaving Certificate that people value and to expand the programme to serve the wider community. She is aware that some will view the process as a dumbing down of the old system, but insists that students of all abilities will be better served by the new model.

"Only 50 per cent of students use the CAO system. About one in five of those that do never complete their third-level courses. Yet, in the minds of many the Leaving Certificate is just about the CAO. We even now express the result in CAO points rather than grades. We need to shift the balance to focus on the value of the Leaving Certificate experience for all students and not just those looking for CAO points. The Leaving Certiicate may be valued, but the strongest support comes from those who have a voice to praise it because they have benefited from it."

Looney knows that many teachers will worry about their place in the change process. "Obviously we need a clear idea of what it takes to introduce these new curricular models into schools. This is a process that has to happen gradually. We have to put schools ahead of any change process. Our traditional approaches have tended to leave schools catching up."

At a recent educational conference Looney heard a teacher expressing despair that he found himself working progressively harder as his students worked less. "We need to address this imbalance for the good of everyone working in and using the system," says Looney.

"We have really exploited the current Leaving Certificate curriculum to our best advantage. We have taken the most out of it that we can. Now it's time to put something into it. We have the ideas, the teaching force and the goodwill. These are not cheap proposals but we can't keep creaking on like this. We're not proposing to throw out the old system and replaceit with something completely new. We want to take the best of the old system and invest in making it better, more effective, more inclusive.

"At a recent ASTI education conference, one speaker suggested that what we needed was neither a Rolls Royce nor a Morris Minor, but a Toyota - a reliable model, where everyone is comfortable, which gets us where we want to go."