Sir, – I refer to the article "Leaving Cert – removing school data risked penalising some students" (News, February 22nd). In light of the contents of this article and having reviewed the arrangements for the upcoming Leaving Cert, I am extremely concerned about the fairness of the Leaving Cert accredited grade process for 2021.
I understand that these are unprecedented times and that the Minister must balance the concerns of parents, students, teachers, etc, but it is clear that the omission of historical school data from calculated and accredited grades results in a system that discriminates against high-performing schools.
I was alarmed to learn from the article that internal Department of Education records reveal how high-performing schools (both private and non-private) were unfairly penalised by the calculated grades system from last year. Specifically, in a document dated August 18th, a senior civil servant commented that “turning off” school historical data meant “better performing disadvantaged schools [are] also thrown under the bus”. The document also revealed that the system meant that some students would “outperform historical plausibility”.
In this way, the department has literally admitted that the omission of school historical data impeded the accuracy and fairness of the calculated grades process. And yet the Minister proposes to use the same system again.
For example, the article points to the fact that Mount Anville school in Dublin experienced a 70 per cent drop in the proportion of H1s awarded in higher-level maths compared with its record. This is a substantial change that goes beyond bell-curve smoothing and radically alters the structure, fairness and credibility of results.
I sat my Leaving Certificate in 2018 and was fortunate to have been educated at a school with a strong record in terms of past performance.
However, I am concerned that such high-performing schools will be unfairly disadvantaged by the accredited grades process in 2021 as they were last year.
Having lived and studied in the UK and witnessed the A-Level process from last year, I understand that school profiling can also be unfair in discriminating against high-performing students from historically “weaker” schools.
However, I do not believe that this injustice should be corrected at the expense of high-performing students from historically “stronger” schools.
Indeed, many of these “stronger” schools are non-fee paying, located in socio-economically disadvantaged areas, and owe their high-performance record to exceptional teaching and the hard work of hundreds of students.
While no system is perfect, and no policy will ever be satisfactory to all, I am concerned by the idea that it now seems to be acceptable for one group of students to be consciously discriminated against by the Government at the expense of another. Positive discrimination is still discrimination. – Yours, etc,
HARRY DEACON,
Sandymount,
Dublin 4.