THE EQUALITY Authority is to launch a High Court challenge against a decision to overturn its finding that two dyslexic students were discriminated against when their Leaving Certificates carried special explanatory notes.
If successful, the appeal could have implications for thousands of students in a similar situation.
The decision to overturn the authority's findings followed an appeal by the Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin, to the Circuit Civil Court, which ended last October.
In a reserved judgment at that time, Judge Anthony Hunt said the end user of a certificate, an employer, was entitled to know whether all parts of an exam had been performed by a candidate.
The claimants had suggested that the presence of a notation on their certificate held them open to the possibility of discrimination.
Judge Hunt allowed the appeal and set aside the awards which the equality officer had made in the case.
However, the chief executive of the Equality Authority, Niall Crowley, confirmed yesterday that it has lodged an appeal against the decision and is awaiting a court date. He declined to comment further. But it is known that the decision can be appealed to the High Court only on a point of law.
The case revolves around claims by the two students, Marian Hollingsworth and Kim Cahill - who are now in their early 20s - that annotations to their Leaving Certificates, showing they had been granted certain privileges during the sitting and marking of exams, labelled them as disabled.
They sat their exams in 2001 having been granted a waiver in relation to the examiner's assessment of spelling and grammar in language subjects.
Equality officer Bernadette Treanor had directed the Minister for Education to pay each student €6,000 in compensation and issue them with new Leaving Certificates without the relevant notations.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Education yesterday confirmed that it plans to contest the authority's challenge. She declined to comment further.
However, the department has previously noted that the original findings by the authority were "potentially far-reaching".
According to figures released last October, the number of "reasonable accommodations" provided for State examination candidates had grown from 2,876 in 2001 to 14,775 by that time.
Commenting on the Circuit Court judgment last October, Ms Hanafin said the system "strikes a fair balance between the need to enable students with disabilities to access the examinations and the need to maintain the integrity of the overall system, promote transparency and ensure fairness to other candidates".
However, reacting last October to the judgment, Mr Crowley expressed concern about Judge Hunt's interpretation of certain provisions of existing equality legislation.
"We are left with a status quo in relation to State examinations where students with disabilities are required to sit a standardised examination which does not permit a disabled person's ability to be measured in comparison with others without reference to their disability," he said.