Leaving Cert has ‘pernicious’ impact on learning, committee hears

The Leaving Cert has a "pernicious" impact on the kind of learning and lives we want for our young people, an Oireachtas committee has heard.

Prof Anne Looney of Dublin City University (DCU) said that while most teachers use a variety of assessment approaches and group work, these "rich and rewarding" practices get displaced by exam practice, marking schemes and sample answers the closer students get to the Leaving Cert.

She said the exams have their current form not because it reflects best practice in assessment, but because it is “culturally embedded”.

“It persists, despite an annual liturgy of hand wringing and head wagging about inequalities in class and gender, concerns for student wellbeing, and pernicious impact on the kind of learning and lives we want for young people, because it has become part of Irish social and cultural life – well beyond the school system,” Prof Looney said.

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“And for this reason, at the end of the annual liturgy as the procession of critics, myself included, moves back into the sanctuary of the academy or ‘commentariat’, we conclude that, in the end, ‘sure what else would we do’, and ‘sure look at the mess they made everywhere else,’ and ‘Amen, let us go in peace to do it all again next year’.”

Prof Looney was one of a number of academics who contributed to an Oireachtas education committee discussion on senior cycle reform.

Despite how embedded the Leaving Cert is in our culture, she said the Covid-19 pandemic had shown it was possible to progress students to further and higher education without sitting the exams.

As a result, she said, this is an opportune time to examine how reforms might better prepare young people for what are going to be “the most challenging decades in human history”.

‘Stacked against’

Tom Collins, emeritus president of Maynooth University, said the Leaving Cert is "stacked against poorer students and less well-resourced schools" in what is an "ostensibly fair" process.

“The appearance of fairness legitimates the outcomes; the winners feel they deserve their results; the losers likewise feel they got their just desserts,” he said. “So, those who come out on top are under no obligation to reflect on the starting out advantages which they had in the academic race and those who come out on the bottom are unaware that they were hamstrung from the outset.”

He said reform of second level will only be possible if the connection between second level outcomes and third level entry, via the CAO points system, is “severed”.

As it stands, he said, the points system means senior cycle is conducted with one eye on third level with the result that the “developmental needs of the child at this stage in their education are sub-ordinated to the requirements of third level entry”. It also “crystallises the inequities which underpin second level outcomes in third level opportunities”, he said.

“In this way, it reproduces existing categories of winners and losers in the parental generation and transforms inherited status into achieved status,” he said.

Decoupling the CAO would mean that the high stakes pressure of the exam would be reduced if not eliminated, he said.

Broader range

Prof Michael O’Leary, of DCU’s centre for assessment research, policy and practice in education, said the senior cycle should be based on the outcomes of a broader range of assessment approaches compared to the current emphasis on high stakes, end of school exams. He suggested that exams in future could be spread out over fifth and sixth year with reduced content.

In addition, he said there was a greater role for continuous assessments, along with collective judgement of in-school teams of teachers about the achievements of students.

Finally, he said there could be an element of “student self-assessment” contributing to decisions around the grading of some assignments and, in particular, competencies associated with key skills. Data from all of these modes of assessment should be used for certifying achievement at the end of post-primary education, he said.

However, Prof O’Leary warned of the potential for over-assessment and increased workloads for students and teachers, while the current relationship between the Leaving Cert exam and the CAO points system poses a “formidable barrier to assessment reform at senior cycle”.