The Irish National Teachers' Organisation has criticised a Government minister's suggestion that primary school pupils might be tested on their writing skills before being allowed into secondlevel schools as "total nonsense". The Minister of State for Education, Mr Willie O'Dea, said at the weekend that writing tests were being considered as an "early warning system" because of growing literacy and numeracy problems among teenagers and adults.
"By identifying those students with reading and writing difficulties at an early age in the educational system, they will be prevented from falling behind and being condemned to an adult life of sub-literacy," he said.
Yesterday Mr O'Dea said he was not talking about "handwriting tests to get into secondary school", but about "identifying learning difficulties as soon as possible." However the INTO's general secretary, Senator Joe O'Toole, said using a handwriting test to determine pupils' ability was "about as logical as determining their ability on the basis of their accents".
He said the INTO fully accepted the need to assess pupils' ability, stressing that the "class teacher, more than anyone else, knows the problem children, those with learning difficulties and those not making progress. Each and every effective teacher can tell the number of non-readers in the class. We do not need international experts to identify our pupils' needs."
Mr O'Toole also criticised a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report which came to the conclusion that one in four Irish people cannot read. "The INTO rejects this out of hand. We challenge anyone to consider their circle of acquaintances and to conclude as the OECD does that one in four of them has a reading difficulty."
There was one way, he said, to resolve the conflict between the INTO and the OECD. The Minister for Education should organise "a comprehensive survey of reading skills levels in Ireland".
A significant part of the work of the committee overseeing this survey should be "defining what exactly constitutes a literacy problem". Mr O'Toole suggested that three groups should be targeted by the survey: the working population between 20 and 65; the long-term unemployed, and primary school-leavers.