Dyslexic woman loses her discrimination appeal over Leaving Cert note

A WOMAN with dyslexia has lost her High Court claim she was discriminated against by the attachment of special explanatory notes to her Leaving Certificate indicating she was not assessed on spelling and certain grammatical elements in language subjects.

Before sitting the Leaving in 2001, Kim Cahill had requested and secured a waiver in relation to the examiner’s assessment of spelling and grammar in language subjects.

She claimed the annotations on her certificate effectively labelled her as disabled and she was greatly distressed by this.

The Equality Tribunal upheld her complaint and directed the Minister for Education to pay compensation of €6,000 to her and another student, Marian Hollingsworth, who made a similar complaint. It also directed the minister to issue both students with new Leaving Certificates without the notations.

The Minister for Education appealed the tribunal’s decision to the Circuit Civil Court, which in 2007 upheld the appeal.

Ms Cahill appealed the Circuit Court decision to the High Court, but in a reserved judgment yesterday, Mr Justice Éamon de Valera dismissed her appeal.

The judge ruled that the Department of Education acted at all times in accordance with international best standards in annotating the certificate to reflect the fact Ms Cahill had secured exemptions from assessment on certain elements. Failure to record the “reasonable accommodation” made to Ms Cahill would “adversely affect the integrity of the testing process” and “essentially defeat the purpose of the exam in the first place”, he said.

The Leaving Certificate occupies “an important place in the Irish educational system and abroad” and “must stand for something”, he said. It was a record of the level of achievement of a person at the end of their secondary education and, if a person was not assessed in spelling and grammar elements of subjects, that “should and must be reflected” in the resulting certificate.

It was also necessary the reputation of the exam be preserved and the Department of Education, in supervising the exam system, acted as “a guarantor of fairness and equality to all candidates”.

He accepted the minister’s argument the deletion of the notation from Ms Cahill’s certificate would constitute a misrepresentation to employers or other persons invited to consider or rely on that document and would also call the integrity of the exam into question.

The judge also rejected Ms Cahill’s claim the Leaving Certificate exam itself is inherently discriminatory in applying a standardised testing to a student with dyslexia. She had claimed such standardised testing effectively tested a student’s disability rather than their ability in the subject under examination.

The evidence was there was no reasonable alternative approach to the testing of spelling which would permit a non-standardised spelling test, he said.

The judge rejected claims Circuit Court Judge Anthony Hunt erred in his interpretation of the relevant provisions of the Equal Status Act 2000.

He said the issue was whether the system of providing exemption from elements of various Leaving Certificate subjects, accompanied by an indication such elements had not beenassessed, amounted to unfavourable treatment to those students who sought and obtained such exemptions or whether it amounted to a failure to provide “reasonable accommodation” for such students.

It would be “unacceptable” to allow exemptions of the type sought and obtained by Ms Cahill without some indication such exemptions had been given, he found. No legal system in the world, according to the evidence, considered some form of accommodation without some indication that accommodation had been made.

Equality Authority chief executive Renee Dempsey called on Tánaiste and Education Minister Mary Coughlan to review practices to improve the accommodation of people with disabilities in state exams.

“Students with disabilities are to be admired for their successes in mainstream education and all existing accommodations assist in this inclusive practice in our education system. It is still possible and necessary for more to be done for students with disabilities,” she said.