Call to enlist teachers’ views in deciding college entry

THE views of teachers should be sought by colleges to help decide which students to admit into third-level courses, according to University of Limerick’s founding president.

As a review continues into the points system used to select undergraduates, Dr Ed Walsh said college applicants’ teachers should be required to give their professional judgment of how they match up to a range of criteria.

Dr Walsh said: “The intensity of competition to get into higher education has caused the system to falter. When I went to university, a reasonable pass got you into what you wanted, but now it’s far more difficult.”

He said the system must be blamed and he welcomed the fact that, after prompting by Education Minister Ruairi Quinn, higher education and second-level groups are assessing ways to change it.

“There are huge downsides, we should look further than the Leaving Certificate. But the final part of change should have to be teachers, who have observed students in classroom for many years, offer their views,” Dr Walsh said.

He added: “If teaching is a profession, then teachers must make judgments and perform professionally as they do in other countries.”

He recounts in his recent book about the founding of the National Institute for Higher Education (NIHE) Limerick — which later became University of Limerick — that it had used such a system to help choose the first cohort of more than 115 students in 1972. It asked applicants’ teachers to rate them under headings such as communication ability, critical and questioning attitude, pursuit of independent study and personal responsibility.

Many of these attributes, he suggests, could now be sought in student assessments and are among those which colleges and employers say are lacking in new entrants and graduates.

At a conference in September to consider ways of reforming the college entry system, there was near unanimity that the Leaving Certificate provides little or no evidence of the skills required in higher education, work or adult life.

But while changes to the senior cycle leading to the Leaving Certificate are also under consideration, Dr Walsh says Mr Quinn needs to remove teaching unions from their role in curriculum change by amending the Education Act.

He served as chairman of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (and its predecessor body the Curriculum and Examinations Board) up to the early 1990s, but said teacher unions are not represented on similar bodies in other countries.

“They have a perfect right to determine pay and conditions but not what is taught and how it is taught,” he said.

Unions have raised strong concerns about recently-approved plans to reform the three-year junior cycle, that stipulate teachers should assess their own students on parts of the qualification that will replace the Junior Certificate.

“I sat for seven years looking at heads of teacher unions who are very capable people but their mandate was to not rock the boat. They are huge drags on trying to change the system and the minister has power to change that international anomaly with the stroke of a pen,” Dr Walsh said.