Why should schools do the cherry-picking work for colleges when this service is so costly to schools and young people? It has led to the once gold-standard Leaving Certificate becoming tarnished beyond the remedy of a superficial repolishing.
Despite the best efforts of teachers, critics state that even the best pupils want to “learn by rote”, lack confidence to direct their own study, distrust activities tangential to a syllabus, skip topics that “won’t come up”, sit in “study” halls for hours and then go straight on to grinds lessons. They select the subjects where they think points can be earned easily and not ones they necessarily find most interesting. They also give up most extracurricular activities, training, matches, school shows and excursions. Or they go mitching because they are overwhelmed.
Then, panicking to finish, teachers feel forced to revert to archaic pedagogy to save time. And all to create stressed pupils fretting through terminal exams where they will fight to regurgitate two years of cramming over three hours on a summer’s day.
It is a perennial angst. Parents, students and teachers know that the stakes are too high for a single terminal exam and the consequences of this high-stakes school shoot-out are serious.
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The answer to this malaise, we are told, is revamping our Leaving Certificate to contain more coursework. The Department of Education will execute this over the next couple of years, even though most teachers think that it has little educational value and will not solve any of the above issues and may even exacerbate them.
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But the nature of this kind of reform is a Sisyphean task because the problem is not really in the curriculum but in the terminal exams’ umbilical attachment to third level entry.
With our points system, students and teachers cannot afford to take risks. And there is no risk-taking at this level because the stakes are too high: failure to get high points means no place in college. Consequently, in the classroom there is less chance of invention, creativity, variety, thought – in other words, education. Meanwhile, the Department is futilely buffing up the curriculum specifications instead.
Ironically, third level lecturers also comment that entrants are over-coached and under-taught despite colleges using the points system to select students.
It might be time to consider unrestricted access to third level education in Ireland, as it is in many other countries. There should be no hurdle placed in school before a college education. Any reform must first sever the link between exam grades and college entry – let’s get rid of points.
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The sturm und drang for young people at such a vulnerable time of their lives would be dissipated. It would leave our schools free to educate holistically and our pupils allowed to flourish in the subjects or activities they best enjoy, rather than being forced to pass six subjects well for the permission to specialise in one they love in college. Let there then be exams in college later that dictate a young person’s right to continue.
Quite when and how that happens is up to colleges. They would pass a manageable number of students they deem capable of continuing. There might be large numbers of first years in vast “amphis”, as there are around Europe, but the market will soon learn where pass rates in different institutions suit pupils of different abilities. High stakes exams would face young people a year later, when they are older and wiser, and the point count had not ruined their secondary level education.
Indeed, colleges might be grateful for an alternative entry procedure when the present demographic bubble pops and they become desperate again for students, as is happening in the UK now where faculty after faculty is being cut.
However, pupils will leave school armed with the experience of their education so that they can make informed choices about the courses in which they are likely to succeed. Someone who struggles in maths, for example, would be unlikely (or foolish) to select a course in actuary science.
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Assessments are still needed and would be externally set and marked and based on a national curriculum. Indeed, since many students are motivated by exams, they would be difficult to teach without some jeopardy ahead of them. However, colleges in Ireland could not use these exam results to discriminate against entrants. Instead, they would become formative assessments that instruct a student about themselves, their achievements, and their potential so they can decide whether next stop will be college, work, a trade, or timeout. There would be pressure, but nothing as in the present system.
If we must measure schools against each other, then base this on their pupil pass-rate after a year of college. Surely the best test of a school is how successfully and happily their alumni negotiate life and learning after they leave, not on how many points they have coached into their students?
Matthew Harrison is an English teacher at Coláiste Iognáid, Galway
