Ruairi Quinn: Teachers willing and able to test own students

Education Minister Ruairi Quinn says the fact that one-in-five students are being marked in oral Irish exams for the Junior Certificate shows teachers are willing and able to assess their own students.

He said State Examinations Commission figures showing a dramatic rise in numbers of schools and students taking part in the test are evidence that this is already happening. The numbers doing the test — which is optional because the commission does not pay outside examiners to visit schools — rose from 725 at 24 schools in 2009 to 10,640 at 196 schools last year after marks for it rose to 40% in 2010.

As reported in the Irish Examiner last week, the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland is reminding members of its ban on marking their own students for State exams, including Junior Certificate oral Irish.

Around 27,000 ASTI and Teachers’ Union of Ireland members will be balloted next month to stop co-operating with reforms that include having teachers mark their own students for a proposed junior cycle student award, to be certified by schools instead of the commission.

It has been open to schools to conduct oral exams for Junior Certificate Irish for the past five weeks, although numbers that do so and students tested will not be known until April.

A spokesperson for Mr Quinn said there is no doubt numbers will increase again, based on the rises of recent years, which he welcomes. “It also shows that teachers in these schools are willing and clearly capable of assessing their own students for the purposes of State exams.

“The new junior cycle student award will not be a State exam, so teachers will not be asked to assess their students for State certification purposes,” she said.

ASTI president Sally Maguire said it is disingenuous to say teachers are assessing their own students, and she believes that is not what happens in most cases.

“In a lot of places, there are ad-hoc arrangements where a teacher will mark students of a neighbouring school, or a retired person comes in,” she said.

“But there’s no standardisation and I can’t be sure you are going to mark a student to the same standard in my school as I might mark students in yours. It has to be a worry for parents that there’s no integrity to the system.”

A TUI spokesperson said the minister’s statement ignored the context in which Junior Certificate oral Irish tests are supported by the union. It allows members conduct them only if there is payment for work outside normal school time, external moderation via the commission, and the final exam is still assessed externally.