Don’t mark own students’ oral Irish, teachers told

Teachers are being reminded by a union not to mark their own students for Junior Certificate oral Irish as pressure mounts over exam reforms.

More than 10,600 students at nearly 200 schools were marked for optional oral exams in Junior Certificate last year, despite the policies of two second-level teaching unions — one which bans members from marking students at the schools where they teach.

The work is not paid for by the State Examinations Commission (SEC) in the way that Leaving Certificate orals are, so schools are left to organise testing themselves. But the number of students examined in this way has risen 13-fold in just four years, from 725 at 24 schools in 2009 to almost 10,640 at 196 schools last year.