Fintan O’Toole: There is no utopian alternative to the Leaving Cert

The pandemic is a teacher and among the things it has been teaching us about is education itself. Six months ago today, the then taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced that "schools, colleges, and childcare facilities will close from tomorrow. Where possible, teaching will be done online or remotely."

The schools and childcare facilities are now open again and, after this week’s Leaving Certificate results, the colleges are busily allocating places before resuming later this month.

Yet, while classrooms may have been silent over the spring and summer, the coronavirus has forced us to conduct some massive real-time investigations into what education is and how it works. Joni Mitchell’s line about not knowing what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone has been all too resonant.

Enforced absence has illuminated what we’ve got – or at least what we thought we had.

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The lessons from this vast and unwanted experiment will not be fully clear for many years. But there are at least five things that we can tentatively say we have learned in the Covid academy.

1. Technology is great but it’s no substitute for physical presence

When Leo Varadkar suggested that teaching could be done online “where possible”, he was reflecting a general uncertainty about what the possibilities really were. But especially at third level, the possibilities have turned out to be greater than most people expected. Academics are usually caricatured as fusty and remote. The reality is that they responded extraordinarily quickly by shifting classes onto Zoom and redesigning them to work remotely.

These possibilities diminish as you go down the levels of education – online learning is harder at second level and almost impossible for young primary school kids. But, given how suddenly the crisis arose, the speed and relative success of adaptation is remarkable.

Yet even the success stories serve to mark out the limits of remote learning. Zoom may be fine for imparting information (though it will be interesting to see what future studies will tell us about how well students concentrate and absorb information online). It’s pretty useless for all the rest of what teaching and learning mean. The pandemic has reminded us that at least half of education is not on the course or in the curriculum. It’s the experience of being together.

This is true at every level. Very young children in pre-school learn a huge amount from each other, just by playing together. At the other end of the spectrum, a teacher leading a postgraduate seminar needs to be able to pick up on unconscious physical cues – who’s the shy person in the room who really has something to say but needs that little smile of encouragement? Online technology is a great tool, but without the intimacy of being together, it can produce only a very limited and impoverished educational experience.

2. When it comes to equality, home life and school life can’t be separated

The closure of schools illuminated a truth that’s always been there – a good home is a huge advantage in education. By sending pupils and students out of the classroom, and putting the onus on their domestic lives, the pandemic has highlighted just how disadvantaged so many of them are.

Almost certainly, all kids suffered to some degree – research on the early months of lockdown in Germany, Austria and Switzerland showed students’ weekly learning time during the Covid-19 lockdown was reduced by between four and eight hours, compared with when schools were open.

But children who were already disadvantaged suffered much more. Their access to technology is much more limited. Their parents may themselves have had far fewer educational resources to draw on when they try to help them. And for many kids, the grim fact is that home is not a calm, stable learning environment – for some, it is the opposite.

What this means is that, on top of all the existing inequalities, we now have an extra gap between those who have managed, more or less, to continue with their development over the past six months, and those who have gone backwards over that time. We know that if this is not addressed urgently, it will have negative lifelong effects on the second group.

3. There is no utopian alternative to the Leaving Certificate

Nobody particularly likes the Leaving Cert and pretty much everybody agrees that it dominates and confines the educational experience. But the Covid-19-induced experiment hasn’t been kind to the most obvious alternative – school-based assessment – either. The system has been edging towards the idea of teachers marking their own pupils, and a version of this has been introduced for the Junior Cert. But, as the experience in the UK and Ireland has shown, it is hugely problematic.

Ireland avoided the debacle of the A-level results in Britain, but it did so (rightly) by sticking more closely to the marks teachers gave their own students and effectively accepting that this involves a major degree of grade inflation.

It could be argued that this shows a lack of professionalism on the part of teachers. But what it actually shows is the greater professional imperative of education: a good teacher must see the best in every student. When you’re teaching, you try to find, even in the weakest student, the thing they’re doing well. You accentuate the positive so you can build the student’s confidence. And that will inevitably feed into the assessment process.

Optimism is a professional duty, but it’s not conducive to the cold business of reducing a student to an all-important grade.

4. The business model of our universities is broken

The pandemic exposed the great contradiction of Ireland’s attitude to higher education. On the one hand, the sector has been an astonishing success. In 2001, 24 per cent of Irish people aged 25 to 64 had a third-level qualification. By 2017, it was 46 per cent. Since the turn of the century, the number of students in the system has risen from 70,000 to 120,000. And this expansion is crucial to Ireland’s economy.

But on the other hand, we don’t want to fund higher education. Most of our colleges now get more than half of their funding from their own sources, which means they have to be run as businesses. This was already deeply problematic, but the pandemic has made it much more so.

One key source of revenue is the high fees charged to students from outside the EU: an average of €18,000 for an undergraduate. In 2017-2018 there were 16,701 full-time international students living in Ireland, paying €226 million in fees.

It is often assumed that they come mostly from Asia and indeed there were 3,055 from China and 2,903 from India. But the biggest source is actually North America (1,650 from Canada, 5,205 from the US). Will these students continue to travel? Will they pay €18,000 for largely online courses? The pandemic is forcing us to confront an issue we have collectively avoided – how do we pay for higher education?

5. The three most dangerous letters are ‘for’

People tend to think – because it is a natural assumption in a civilised country – that the Constitution obliges the State to provide free primary education. It doesn’t. It obliges the State to provide “for” primary education. This is the inheritance of Church control: the intention was to make clear that the State’s business was to come up with the money, leaving it to the Church to deliver the education.

Even though the Church in practice no longer does this, the legacy is that schools (at second as well as primary level) are in theory private and independent entities. The public pays the teachers and (mostly) pays for the buildings, but the system itself is not public.

The pandemic has shown that this is a decidedly mixed blessing for schools - too often it means “you’re on your own”. State planning for the reopening of schools (from changes to physical infrastructure to the management of school transport) was relatively minimal. Principals and boards of management have had to do the heavy lifting of trying to adapt buildings and create safe spaces, with no centralised procurement or ordering of prefabs.

Thus, for example, many primary schools have no hot water in their toilets. Annual maintenance grants have not covered the cost of even very basic cleaning. Why? Because there are no common national standards and no sense that it is the State’s job to ensure that children have basic rights when it comes to issues like sanitation, heating and space. These are extras that schools are supposed to ask parents to fund.

Surely one of the most basic lessons of the pandemic is that we have to move towards what almost every other developed country has: an integrated system of public education in which schools are a public responsibility.

Covid-19 has reminded us that if schools are not open, neither society nor the economy can function properly. For far too long, they have been taken for granted. It should not have required a terrible plague to remind us how important they are to the life of the nation.