Unions to ballot teachers on exam reforms
The decision was taken after talks designed to address teachers’ concerns around the delivery of the reforms ended without progress last Friday.
Both the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) and the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) said the Department of Education had failed to provide concrete details of how schools are to deliver the proposed changes against a backdrop of five years of cutbacks in education.
Yesterday Pat King, ASTI general secretary, said that teachers were “ill-prepared, not convinced, and not ready” to implement the revised cycle which is due to commence with changes in the way English is assessed come next September.
The changes will mean that students are awarded 40% of marks by their own teachers through a process of continuous assessment while 60% of the exams will be graded under a national system. The teachers’ unions said this raises concerns around objectivity and moderating standards.
An ASTI spokeswoman said there was “no way of moderating standards between schools and no-one knows if an ‘A’ grade in one school will be the same as an ‘A’ in another”.
Both the ASTI and the TUI claim schools have yet to be properly resourced to deliver the changes.
Schools will be expected to run additional short courses in areas outside of the main subjects as part of the revised cycle.
TUI president Gerard Craughwell said introducing change without adequate preparation could cause “untold lasting damage to the education system and particularly to individual students”.
Mr King said the department had decided to introduce a revised junior cycle without consulting any of the 25,000 practitioners involved: “25,000 teachers are saying ‘Hold it’. If 25,000 doctors were saying ‘Hold it’ people would listen.”
However, Education Minister Ruairi Quinn said he had been listening to the teachers and that proof of this was his agreement to slow the pace of reform, with just one subject to come under the planned “continuous assessment” regime in each of the next two years.
He had also agreed to an extra day-and-a-half training for teachers involved in the process, bringing total training to four-and-a-half days. He was unable to clarify over what timeframe this training would take place.
Speaking yesterday on RTÉ radio, Mr Quinn said school management bodies, under the auspices of the Joint Managerial Body, as well as parents, were in favour of a changed junior cycle.
He said students “swotting for questions” that they believed would feature on exam papers was “not education” but “rote learning” and that the revised programme would help students “solve problems and think for themselves”.
The unions have not yet decided on a date for balloting members on withdrawal of co-operation with the reforms and industrial action.
