Una Mullally: Students fear failure, but the Department of Education has openly embraced it

The Leaving Cert being cancelled may be every teenager in Ireland’s dream manifested, but why have we been left with such a mess? Other government departments had to instigate nothing short of radical change at the outset of the pandemic. How did it take two months for the Department of Education and Skills to figure out an exam?

The disruptions we’ve all faced to protect our society against Covid-19 are severe, but teenagers have borne a disproportionate brunt. The decision of the department, and of its Minister, Joe McHugh’s kinda-cancel-and-mark-but-not-really-and-you-can-also-maybe-sit-the-exam-anyway approach is a potentially unworkable fudge. Hopefully this hames of a non-solution will instigate the widescale reform we actually need for universal access to third-level education to become a reality, but more likely we’ll continue to encounter the kind of obfuscation that typifies our education system and the powers that control it.

McHugh isn’t exactly the most inspiring Minister, but even reformers such as Ruairí Quinn, Jan O’Sullivan and Richard Bruton could get relatively little over the line in their tenures, as they struggled, for example, to instigate the long-overdue secularisation of Irish schools. The paradox at the heart of the Department of Education is that it controls and oversees everything and nothing, that reform is resisted while the department simultaneously defaults to the autonomy of individual schools, the vast majority of which are still under the patronage of religious organisations and the mysterious oversight of boards of management.

If any department embodies the perception of a “permanent government” that turns with all the speed and nimbleness of an aircraft carrier reversing in a storm, it is the Department of Education. In the introduction to the guide to calculated grades for students published by the department, it lays the responsibility at McHugh’s feet: “he is offering a system of calculated grades,” it reads. The “skills” in the department’s title perhaps mostly refers to its own skill of deflection. There often tends to be an undercurrent of delegation-at-all-costs in its decision-making or indeed in its obligations; it’s schools, it’s boards of management, it’s teachers’ unions, it’s students, it’s parents, it’s school management – it’s anyone but the department.

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Dirty secret

Two data sets will be used to come up with an exam result: a school-based estimation of an overall percentage mark and ranking to be awarded to a student in a particular subject, and “data available from the State Examinations Commission – this includes data on past performances of students in each school and nationally.” The idea of adjudicating someone’s performance based on the ghosts of Leaving Certs past is, very obviously, unfair, even leaving aside the dirty secret of the Leaving Cert historically being marked to a curve.

After that, a school must give “a class ranking for each student in each subject”. Estimating those marks and rankings then has more layers imposed on it: “school alignment of marks for a subject through a subject alignment group comprising teachers who are teaching the subject to Leaving Cert students this year”.

Everyone knows that students really step up a gear from March onwards in preparation for the Leaving Cert exams. The department’s document instructs, “Where additional work has been completed after schools were closed on March 13th, teachers will be advised to exercise due caution where that work suggests a change in performance.”

The mental gymnastics continue: “When making estimations for language subjects, teachers should base them on the assumption that the oral examination component would have proceeded as usual.” Or how about, “If a student has joined the class from another class in the school, the teacher will consult with the previous teacher and get whatever relevant records they have. If the student has joined the class from another school, and if the length of time is such that the teacher considers he/she does not have enough evidence to make a sound judgment, he/she should consult with school management about acquiring additional information from the student’s previous school.”

Principals and oversight

The school principal then has oversight over the marks and ranking process. I hate to assume the worst of principals in high-performing and/or fee-paying schools, but what principal is not going to want to project a golden image of their school? Especially when the economy is currently collapsing, and with it too the capacity of parents to pay high fees for their child’s State-funded yet private education.

The common thread is that the burden of responsibility and pressure to sort everything out has been placed on teachers. Like many people who do difficult jobs in society for not much money, teachers are easy targets. They also fall victim to the projection of our own school-time grievances well into adulthood. Teachers are frontline workers, yet are strangely absent from the current public narrative of applause and gratitude.

The whole thing is a mess. I’m not sure what the solution actually is, but it’s not this. There are multiple other issues: how “disadvantaged schools” will be victimised by “ranking”, the obvious prospect of legal challenges from students, and the absence of colleges and universities from the conversation. Students fear failure, so why have the department and the Minister so openly embraced just that?