There have been growing calls for clarity for Leaving Certificate students regarding this year s exams.
Both Opposition and Government parties have asked the Minister for Education to provide certainty or give a date as to when a decision will be made, and to publish contingency plans.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Six one News this evening, Minister Norma Foley reiterated that it was the Government’s intention to proceed with the traditional exams and she said consultation with teacher, parent, school and student representatives was ongoing.
Labour s Aodhán Ó Ríordáin told the Dáil that an early decision was necessary and the waiting was intolerable for students in 6th year.
As the fiasco that was the 2020 Leaving Cert drew to an undignified close there was but one crumb of comfort for those who would follow, for the class of 2021: It couldn t possibly be that bad again.
They had seen the impact on their predecessors, saw how the on-off uncertainty surrounding exams which were confirmed, moved forward and then finally cancelled had pushed their peers almost to breaking point.
They had looked on, aghast, as the calculated grades system spat out results arbitrarily, favouring some over others and reducing living, breathing, panicking students into binary numbers.
But they gained solace in the knowledge that lessons had been learned, that the class of 2020 were an outlier, the unfortunate ones caught in the eye of the storm.
The Department of Education should abandon the Junior Certificate this year and concentrate on getting the Leaving Certificate ‘done properly’, a leading education expert has said.
The ‘time-consuming token nonsense’ of classroom-based assessments should also be shelved in the pandemic, according to Kevin Williams, a research fellow at DCU, author and former president of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland.
His intervention comes after Education Minister Norma Foley was forced into a U-turn this week on plans for exam year students to attend school three days a week. When the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI) and Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) both directed their members to not cooperate with the in class Leaving Cert. plan Minister Foley was forced to back down.