Irish Teacher: Why I've changed my mind about the hybrid model for the Leaving Cert
Picture: Larry Cummins
I suggested on the radio this week that this year’s Leaving Cert students should get the hybrid model.
I’ve changed my mind since. I don’t think a hybrid model is the way to go, but I do think we need to provide fairer exams for our students, less content, more choice.
My sixth-year students are in their third disrupted academic year. Half of their post-primary school life has been led under Covid conditions.
Teacher unions and the Department of Education disagree with making robust changes to the traditional exam. They’ve drawn a line in the sand because accredited grades distress the CAO system. Unions highlight the lack of Junior Cert results (for those who didn’t complete Transition Year) as a problem they simply can’t fix. Accredited grades are an impossibility, they say. The last two years have been exceptional but it’s time to move on.
Come June, we’ll be treated to pictures of students in exam halls. The numbered cogs will slot back into the machine. Normality will return.
But nothing about school is normal right now. Covid is not so easily ushered out of our students’ lives, or their memories.
A lovely couple reached out to me after my comment on the radio. They have two sons - I’ll call them John and Shane. John is profoundly immune suppressed; he will always need the care of an adult and in time that adult will most likely be his only sibling, Shane. Shane is highly academic and ambitious about his future. His parents describe him as a "fantastic boy, compassionate, careful". During lockdown his family lived separately to protect one brother from the other.
Every day he weighs up the consequences of attending school.
The decision to open school buildings instead of providing education for everyone has been difficult for Shane. He would prefer the option of remote learning during peaks and surges and must take little comfort in Norma Foley’s publicly announced ‘achievement.’ The Leaving Cert Shane will face contains only minor differences to those sat before the pandemic. There will be tweaks, small adjustments – but Shane has made far more than tweaks and small adjustments to his life over the last three years.
Shane’s father suggests that his son, and others like him, are ‘sacrificial lambs’ caught in a political debate that has more to do with optics than addressing students’ legitimate concerns.
Professor Pol O'Dochertaigh, Deputy President and Registrar at NUI Galway, speaking on RTÉ One, explained that the hybrid is a bad idea because of flaws in the accredited grade system. He highlighted the fact that six times as many students got over 600 points last year, describing such grade inflation as intensely unfair because some students got a leg up from teachers who said they were ‘good’ at something. Aside from the teacher disdain inherent in the comment, his point is valid.
The accredited grade model is flawed.
Another parent, again with two sons, made contact following the radio interview. One son completed the Leaving Cert in 2020, the other will sit the exam in 2022. She’s fearful of any return to the accredited grade system. She outlined her concerns in a letter to the students’ union: ‘Over 90% of students sat 245,850 written leaving cert papers in 2021. Therefore, it was possible to compare the actual leaving cert results with the outcomes of the accredited grade system. The results show that the in 68.7% of grades predicated from the accredited grade system were incorrect. These massively inflated grades created a corresponding inflation in CAO points (by an approximate average of 50-60 points over 2019) and significantly less candidates got their first preference offer.’
So, having listened and reflected, I think we’re right to avoid the current hybrid model.
But what about the exam itself?
The government’s intransigence relates to the hybrid model but fails to dig any deeper, fails to acknowledge the likes of Shane. I can’t stop thinking about him and the students like him who will now compete with the inflated grades of the last two years without any significant support or concession. Shane is being dealt a double-blow and nobody is trying to protect him.
While everyone is focusing on the binary debate between hybrid or no hybrid, we’re over-looking that lovely fertile, grey space in the middle - that wonderful possibility of compromise. It’s not as politically exciting but we can still change the exam. We must, at the very least, provide the same generous exam given to students last year.
It’s not perfect but it’s something. And young people like Shane deserve at least that.
