Madam, - The Department of Education and Science should stop placing annotations on Leaving Certificates for students with disabilities and learning difficulties.
Leaving Certificates are annotated to show that the student had had reasonable accommodations during the exam. Reasonable accommodations are used by students with disability to help them deal with the disadvantage caused by their disability in an unfriendly examination situation. In other situations such as doing essays/ projects, or indeed in the workplace drafting documents, people with disabilities are as capable and as competent in producing written work to standard as other people.
Yes, they have a disability, which may have an impact on their reading and writing skills. For example, a blind student will perhaps take an additional 20 per cent of the time to produce an essay, a dyslexic student may take an extra 10 minutes to read a document. But they will get there and produce work to an excellent standard, they just need extra time or different equipment.
The difficulty lies with the Leaving Certificate itself. It is well known to be an emotionally pressured, task and time-pressured exam. In addition it represents a major barrier for many students with disabilities as they simply cannot demonstrate what they can do.
Reasonable accommodations are internationally recognised good practice as they acknowledge the considerable disadvantage that students with disability are working with in an exam situation and allows them to deal with it.
The department appears to think it gives them an advantage, but this is absolutely not the case. Think about it, how could a blind student or text-disabled student answer the exam in writing? However, they can answer it in other ways, for example by using a computer.
Surely whether it is handwritten or computer produced is irrelevant, unless it is the handwriting which is being assessed. So why label the student and diminish their achievement with a yellow pack certificate when it is the exam environment which is at fault? We urge the department to reconsider its position on reasonable accommodations. - Yours, etc,
ANN HEELAN, Director, Association for Higher Education Access and Disability, Carysfort Ave, Blackrock, Co Dublin.