Ruairi Quinn: Negative reaction part and parcel of democracy
The heckling and, at times overbearing, shouting from the floor where around 500 Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland delegates sat, was akin to the type of classroom behaviour that will be mentioned in debates this week.
But as he seeks to win a public opinion battle on his Junior Cycle Student Award (JCSA) proposal, he will have been aware of the likely response, the media coverage it would receive, and likely consequent public comment on teachers.
However, the majority of ASTI members — not just the minority who refused to listen to Mr Quinn — were resounding in their applause for union president Sally Maguire, as she delivered their message on why teachers should not mark their own students — even, she said, if the Junior Certificate’s replacement will no longer be a high-stakes exam.
Ms Maguire warned the minister that the confidence held by a “whopping” 76% of Irish people in their education system — twice that, she claimed, that recent Dutch research found they have in Government — is about to be destroyed if his proposals go ahead.
“We want change but we want a fair, equitable, transparent state-assessed examination system,” the union leader said. She presented him with just shy of 10,000 ASTI member signatures supporting opposition to the JCSA plans, on which Mr Quinn went against advice of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment by insisting teachers mark their own students in final exams instead of the State Examinations Commission.
The ASTI members earlier applauded Mr Quinn on their feet, but only in a mocking way, as he tried to dissect the argument the union makes to retain state-certified exams at the end of junior cycle. “Better, you say, that students should be ‘judged’ by an external agency,” he said, unable to complete his sentence as delegates roared ‘Yes’ and stood clapping in unison.
They did so again when he tried to reassert his point and proceed. The wider point he was making related to the argument by ASTI and the TUI — both now on industrial action over the JCSA proposals — that they do not want to become judges rather than advocates for their students. Both he and the teacher unions have important and worthy arguments on the issue; both sides are agreed the system needs to change for the benefit of students.
However, the impasse over who should assess students at the end of the process has been going on since Mr Quinn first announced the wider and overwhelmingly positive junior cycle reform package early in October 2012, albeit the issue has only been subject of significant public discussion in recent months.
As long as the minister continues to insist, as he has repeatedly, that the ship in relation to external assessment has sailed away, then the clear message from teachers — and not just their union leaders — that they are not on board looks unlikely to change either.
