The Department of Education is considering abandoning this year's Junior Cert exam if the threat by secondary teachers to the Leaving Cert continues.
While the Minister for Education, Dr Woods, claimed yesterday the Junior Cert would proceed as normal, senior sources said the cancellation of the exam is among the options being considered by officials to protect the Leaving Cert exam.
The Department believes because the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland (ASTI) is likely to pull out of exam work, it would be impossible to run both exams. By dropping the Junior Cert, the Department may have a chance of staging the Leaving Cert.
The other options under discussion in the Department include:
The deferral of Leaving Cert oral and practical exams which are due to take place next month
The use of third-level graduates and, in emergency cases, undergraduates to correct exams.
The decision to abandon the Junior Cert would affect about 60,000 pupils who are in their third year of preparation for it.
If the exam is cancelled, then schools may be asked to issue reports to pupils instead, made up from their grades between 1st and 3rd years. However, this may draw an angry response from parents.
The Department has been looking at dropping the Junior Cert exam for some years and moving instead to a system of continuous assessment.
Department sources stress that the abandonment of the exam would be a last resort. A decision to take such a drastic step would not happen unless it became clear there was no alternative to protect the Leaving Cert. The Department believes the marking of exams will present most difficulties if ASTI's action continues.
The prospect of recruiting graduates and undergraduates is no surprise; last year the Department used undergraduates to mark some Junior Cert exams in Civil, Social and Political Education (CSPE) as it had difficulty recruiting teachers for the work. This drew an angry response from parents concerned that inexperienced markers might not do a professional job.
Introduced a decade ago, the Junior Cert was intended to provide a wide-ranging and innovative means of learning. But its potential has not been realised, according to the Department's own discussion paper published two years ago. In recent years, it has been criticised as being no more than a mirror image of the Leaving Cert.
Yesterday, Dr Woods made it clear the Government would use every weapon in its armoury to ensure the Leaving Cert exam would proceed. He conceded it might not be possible to run the exam as smoothly as normal if the strike action continues.
With the ASTI executive set to meet tomorrow, informal talks are continuing to revive the peace moves involving Mr Tom Pomphrett of the Labour Relations Commission. ASTI withdrew from this process after members were docked five days' pay shortly before Christmas for working to rule.
ASTI is seeking a guarantee the docked money will be refunded without preconditions. The Government is willing to do so but only in the context of an overall peace package.