Planned new Leaving Cert reforms will affect students in disadvantaged schools while benefiting those whose parents can afford to pay for private education, the ASTI conference has been told.
Science teacher Michael McGrath, from Dungarvan, Co Waterford, said the reforms put forward by the Department of Education would present a challenge for voluntary secondary schools, but DEIS schools would be “wiped out”.
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On the other hand private and grind schools would benefit, he told delegates at the annual conference of the ASTI second-level teachers’ union.
“I know one private school, I won’t name it, where they’re already pre-empting the situation. They have a big old disused assembly hall being converted to a state-of-the-art science lab with two lab technicians. That’s not coming cheap,” he said.
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He said parents paying for private education were being asked “to dig a little deeper” with the suggestion they would have a better chance of getting their children into college courses such as medicine or physiotherapy.
“I’m in a voluntary secondary school. I’m lucky. We have four labs, but we only have equipment for two and we divide it up. There is a school in my town which has 330 boys [and] one science lab at present with no prospect of a new lab for years,” he said.
“And at present, the junior cycle science is taught from a trolley – anything they can bring like weights and measures and, maybe, measuring a volume of liquid. But there is no such thing as a bunsen burner; they never light a bunsen burner until Leaving Cert.”
Mr McGrath said schools teaching the International Baccalaureate programme had a 20 per cent practical assessment in science subjects. He said they were already seeing “cheating happening” and were going back to 10 per cent and probably back to zero.
He said he would not know what to teach if the planned Government reforms were implemented as scheduled in September.
“There’s chaos facing us,” Mr McGrath said.
He said he always prepared students to achieve the top mark, a H1, in biology Leaving Cert. However under the plans for the new senior cycle he did not know how to do that.
Mr McGrath said he was considering retiring from teaching.
He said other teachers were also looking at leaving the profession in advance of the planned changes to the senior education cycle.
“They are telling me they do not want to relearn and retrain for an impossible task”, he said.
