Evan Stanford’s eloquent letter to the Editor of The Irish Times during the week was a dignified plea for attention to be paid to third-year students. It deserves a response. Third years, he says, are a cohort “largely unheard, overlooked and forgotten”, while all the focus is on the Leaving Cert.
Evan, you are dead right. Very little attention has been paid to third years, and this has been true for the past three academic years. The Junior Cycle exams were quickly deemed disposable in 2020. Back then, those students were delighted but not so delighted when they hit senior cycle this year and realised that a significant State examination was looming and they had scant preparation.
Third years were scarcely mentioned in 2021. And in 2022, the assumption is that business as usual can be resumed.
If we look specifically at those who will be sitting the examinations this June, they were only first years in March 2020, just about beginning to find their way as the youngest pupils at second level. During the first lockdown, all the focus was first on exam classes and that rapidly shifted to Leaving Certificate students. Most schools had nothing approximating the normal level of school-based examinations at the end of their first year.
When it came to second year, it was miserable for them, with stringent health and safety regulations curtailing not just school but every aspect of their lives. The lockdown after Christmas was no longer a delightful extension of the school holidays but often a lonely, boring time. (Some students thrived, especially introverted students who like working alone, but even they need to be taught.)
During the second lockdown, teachers were more au fait with live-streaming classes. But it still was absolutely possible for a student to coast through the time they were out of school without learning much. Once again, Leaving Certs took precedence, returning to school long before everyone else. (I am not suggesting that the Leaving Certs were exactly thrilled with life, either, but they were the focus of attention.)
With their non-Leaving Cert students, teachers grew accustomed to staring at blank screens and no matter how they cajoled, only a minority would turn on their cameras. That is if live streaming was going on at all. If a student lived in an internet black spot, had no device other than a phone or not much home support, they were in trouble.
For a significant minority of students, mental health challenges became overwhelming.
Students had wildly varying experiences during both lockdowns. Some schools were teaching virtually full timetables online almost immediately. Others were relying on apps like Google Classroom, posting work online or just emailing work. Some were sending out photocopied worksheets.
Classroom-based assessments
This academic year dawned and the only concession for the current cohort of third years is that they had to do only one classroom-based assessment (CBA) rather than two. CBAs are basically project work that is presented to your class.
Unlike some teachers, I am not anti-CBA. I really like the two CBAs that were introduced in English, for example. One involves making a presentation and the other, drafting and re-drafting pieces of work until the student is happy with them.
Both are invaluable skills for future life. Nonetheless, when students are producing CBAs in 10 subjects, the novelty wears off very quickly. The temptation in middle-class households to add some polish or more than a little is overwhelming.
You will notice that I have been using the term Junior Cycle. In future years, whether you call it the Junior Cert or Junior Cycle will be as big a giveaway of your age as those outside the teaching profession who still, God help us, call it the Inter Cert.
Junior Cycle reform, that is, replacing the old Junior Cert with a more skills-based approach had been ongoing but the reality was a hybrid of a different kind to the hybrid Leaving Cert that garners all the media attention.
Sample papers
The Junior Cycle was introduced slowly, subject by subject, year by year. When the pandemic began in 2020, there were still subjects that had never been examined in State examinations and there were not even sample papers available.
Asking Junior Cycle in-service providers when the sample exam papers would emerge was likely to get the lofty response that this was an old-fashioned concern, as the exam was now low stakes.
The lack of understanding of teenage psychology is stunning. Not knowing the format of an exam just increases teenage stress. The lack of choice in many exam subjects is also stressful rather than reassuring.
So, this year, third-year students who have missed significant learning time and have had little chance to practise the much-vaunted skills will be facing examinations that are still very much unknown territory to them.
What can be done? Either give them more time (all the exams are now two hours) or give them more choice on the existing papers. It was possible to do it for Leaving Certs. It should be possible to do it for Junior Cycle students. The third years represented by Evan deserve to be heard.