There has been a long tradition stretching back to the foundation of the State of paying close attention to legislation drafted in Whitehall. We inherited a body of law from the “mother of all parliaments” in Westminster and mirroring UK amendments to this legislative inheritance might appear to be the safest option, unless there was clear evidence that such changes would not be politically acceptable in Ireland.
It is in this context that we must now examine how Ireland, in seeking to certify the Leaving Cert class of 2020, selected the model of calculated grades already adopted by the UK following the closure of schools last March. Why would our senior educational civil servants look beyond what our nearest neighbours were doing?
Predicted grades are central to the UK college application system. All A-level applicants get a prediction by January in the year of their application for every subject from their teacher. This forms the basis of offers from universities for college places.
A decision last April to get teachers in the UK to go through the same process to predict final results seemed like simplicity itself. The need to adjust those grades to conform to the pattern of results in previous years did not seem like a very steep fence to jump, or so it seemed.
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The political and administrative chaos this caused is now evident to all, as is the decision by all four administrations to revert to the original teachers’ assessments. Amazingly, after Scotland’s experience last week, the UK, Welsh and Northern Ireland education authorities continued into the same mire, before it all fell apart in recent days.
Where does that leave the Irish-based process which has been underway for weeks now within the special unit established within the Department of Education in Athlone, to make a similar adjustment to the assessed grades submitted by Ireland’s second level teachers?
The UK model has blown up spectacularly and there does not seem to be a way of avoiding a similar outcome when our students receive their assessed grades on September 7th. Our civil servants seem for now to be proceeding to the original plan.
But if we step back now and reflect on what has happened in the UK, we will see that the escape route from chaos is staring us in the face: abandon any attempt to try and fit this year’s calculated grades awarded by teachers into a pattern of results that fits with previous years - and award students the grades which schools have submitted.
Yes, these results will be far in excess of any previous years grades, but within the cohort of this year’s 44,000 current Leaving Cert students, who have applied to the CAO, this will not matter. Every student will get the grade which his or her teacher thought they deserved, when asked to make that assessment in June.
The only downside of this is that it would be grossly unfair to thousands of applicants to the CAO who are applying for college places this year based on their results in Leaving Cert exams from previous years.
But there is a solution. It lies in the fact that each course director of every CAO programme in Ireland has accurate data on applicants and how many of them fall into both categories: this year’s Leaving Cert students and those who sat the exams in previous years.
To ensure a fair distribution of all of the college places on offer in the weeks ahead, the CAO needs to divide out the applicants into two groups, representing those who will receive calculated grades by their teachers in 2020, and those who have a Leaving Cert result from a previous year.
Colleges and their course directors, using their own departments’ records, can then instruct the CAO to offer all the available places to each of these two groups independently, based on previous years’ historical distribution.
If every current year student gets their teachers’ assessed grades, who can complain? We place our trust in these teachers when we asked them to use their professional judgement in making these assessments last June. Why question their judgement now if, in accepting their verdict, we protect previous Leaving Cert applicants by ring-fencing an accurate proportion of places for them?
Some unsuccessful applicants for prestigious courses might complain that more students from disadvantaged communities got offers of high points course, which they would not have achieved if the exams had occurred and previous patterns of results were replicated.
Politically, that seems as easier outcome to defend than a situation where many students from disadvantaged communities may end up having their predicted results downgraded to fit into some previous predetermined pattern. This is what destroyed the process adopted in the UK.
There might be some unease among teachers whose students’ would become aware in such a scenario of the exact grade they awarded to every student.
As someone who taught at both second and third level during my teaching career, I don’t think this should be a problem. In university. lecturers stand over the grade they award students. It’s part and parcel of the job. I don’t see that letting students know your assessment of their potential would in any way undermine teachers.
The Minister for Education and the Government have days to defuse the potential time-bomb which adopting the UK model has resulted in.
Brian Mooney is a guidance counsellor and a former assistant school principal. He writes on education for the The Irish Times