The possibility of closing all secondary schools for a week every year to facilitate oral exams in language subjects will be one of a number of options explored at a meeting of a Department of Education review group today. The group will consider the future operation of the Leaving Certificate oral exams in language subjects, amid increasing concern about the acute shortage of teachers for the tests.
There is broad agreement among the education partners that the current system is near breaking point. The meeting, described by one source as a "brainstorming session", will tease out ways of staging the exams from 2001 on. This year's oral exams, due in April, will proceed as normal. The options under discussion include:
Closing all secondary schools for one week in March/April each year.
Holding the oral exams at the end of fifth year, possibly during the summer holidays, to avoid disruption in the run-in to the Leaving Certificate.
Holding the exams during the Easter holidays or on a Saturday during school term.
Ideally, some school managers would like language teachers to conduct the oral exams on their own pupils as part of a continuous assessment programme. But this proposal has met stiff resistance from the 16,000-member Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland .
Mr John White, its deputy general secretary, said last night: "Continuous assessment by the students' own teacher runs counter to the valued tradition of objective external assessment. In a small country like Ireland, this external model is worth preserving."
The logistical operation involved in staging the oral exams is immense. In all, the Department of Education is responsible for about 110,000 oral exams in Irish, French, German, Spanish and Italian over two weeks. More than 1,300 teachers are seconded from their schools to act as oral examiners. But this, in turn, creates huge difficulties for schools which must cope without their normal staff numbers.
Many schools have been reluctant to commit teachers to the oral exams because of the impact this would have on language teaching in the critical weeks before the Leaving Certificate. In recent years, some school managers have expressed concern about the disruption caused to the everyday life of the school. Today's meeting will be attended by representatives of the teachers' unions, parents, school managements and Department officials. While some would favour the introduction of continuous assessment by teachers to resolve the difficulties, this would run counter to the thrust of the Irish exam system, which views the independence of the external examiner as an article of faith.
In its discussion document on reform of the Junior Certificate last year, the Department acknowledged that the shortage of examiners to fulfil the range of functions required for both Leaving and Junior Cert levels had now reached crisis point. "Releasing teachers from schools means removing teachers from classrooms, causing serious problems for schools and school managements at critical times in the school year and giving rise to genuine concerns and anxiety for parents and students."
Schools are "increasingly reluctant to release the numbers of teachers necessary to sustain the system as it is at present structured," it noted.