Leaving Cert reform, teacher training costs, hidden funding cuts: The year ahead in schools

Principal warns that lessons must be learned from junior cycle reform in the handling of Leaving Certificate changes

Leaving Cert reform is a concern as teachers have 'misgivings' over junior cycle changes. Picture: Leon Farrell

As the new school term gets under way, principals across the country are bracing for changes and challenges in the classroom.

Balancing building projects along with vast amounts of admin, recruitment, and tight budgets are some of the tasks school leaders are facing, on top of the day-to-day running of a school or rolling out curriculum changes.

For Seán Twomey, principal of Saint Aloysius' College in Carrigtwohill, Cork, there’s one major reform that is playing on his mind.

“What would be worrying me, let’s call a spade a spade, it's Leaving Cert reform,” he said. “We’re going to be starting in the middle of it, when the vast majority of teachers that I know have misgivings about the Junior Cycle reforms.”  The Junior Cycle reforms have been introduced on a phased basis since 2014.

It's not been a huge success. It can be very demotivating for very good students and can give false confidence in their abilities to other students as they head into the Leaving Cert.

“It’s meant that a lot of schools, ourselves included, made changes to their fourth-year programme as a result," said Mr Twomey.

“We can’t afford to mess up Leaving Cert reform, but we’re not too confident in how it will be handled. If you look at the way we’ve managed Junior Cycle reform, it's very much based on a skills-based ideology.

 “Take Junior Cycle maths this year: There were 10 questions in it and there was a weighted marking scheme, from what I heard from the people who marked it, for the most difficult question.

“So few students did well on that question, they changed the marking scheme and gave a different weighting to an easier question. That hasn’t rewarded the good students, it has rewarded what I would say are the lucky students.

'We can’t afford to mess up Leaving Cert reform but we’re not too confident in how it will be handled,' says Seán Twomey, principal of Saint Aloysius' College, Carrigtwohill. Picture: David Keane

“They don’t put the marks on the exam paper. What are we trying to hide? Tell students the marks for each question," he said.

“Teachers weren’t very closely listened to during the last round. Now, I’m not saying that the teachers’ unions are always right but sometimes you have to realise the people on the ground are going to have a genuine opinion about what exactly is going to be needed, and how reform should look.” 

There needs to be some sort of reform of the Leaving Certificate, but there also needs to be some sort of reform of the CAO process, he believes.

“Universities are getting away with an awful lot, and the fact that they don’t have to take any charge of their enrolment process in any way. If you take the UCAS system in the UK, it takes the three best results and there is also a personal statement," said Mr Twomey.

“Some universities actually do interviews; there’s a lot more work put in both from the schools and from the universities. Education is not all about just feeding into third level, whereas if you look at it in Ireland, secondary schools are treated as a feeder system to third level.” 

Another issue in post-primary education, he believes, is the cost of teacher training.

The two-year Professional Master of Education (PME) typically costs between €10,000 and €12,000.

“In teaching as a profession, morale is low. I know from the outside people see teachers having great holidays, and to be fair they do, but there is a supply crisis," he said.

A factor in this is the high cost of the two-year degree.

It’s now taking five to six years to qualify as a teacher. When I was going to university, that time would qualify you as a doctor.

“What happens as a result of that is that it becomes a middle-class profession and that doesn’t reflect society," he said.

“That’s not good because schools need to reflect the society they are a part of. 

“There are an awful lot of issues in schools at the moment; Anxiety, gender politics, freedom of expression, housing, immigration, all of those outside societal issues are coming in to schools and schools need to deal with those. They need to be reflective of all views in society so they can properly educate young people to see the middle and not just one side.” 

Key issues in primary schools

Simon Lewis, principal of Carlow Educate Together National School, said a few key issues affecting primary school education seem to have flown under the radar this year.

“This is the first year that no new Educate Together has opened, since I think 2009,” he said.

“For me, I see it as baffling. I suppose the people in charge will say the Programme for Government is prioritising community national schools (CNS) but they haven’t really opened many of those either.

Simon Lewis says failure to pay schools the ICT grant this year is a 'big blip'.

“I’m 20 years in the job and they are making up reconfiguration pilots every five minutes. The real reason I think is just absolute apathy,” he said.

The failure to pay schools the information and communications technology (ICT) grant this year was a “big blip”, he believes.

“Every school has been in this relatively nice period knowing that we were going to get a few thousand euro every year to ensure technology and equipment would be maintained. 

“The grant has never been enough, but it's been enough to sort of trundle along with reasonable second-hand and refurbished equipment. Schools are pretty resourceful, but this year they just stopped paying it. 

“When it came up, the response was ‘we hope it will be paid in 2024’, that was it. 

“The impact of that is that schools are going to really struggle with their technology infrastructure, and given that we have a new curriculum subject coming down the line in technology shortly, I think a lot of schools are very, very worried about how that is going to work if we can’t even guarantee the bare minimum of funding to have technology in our schools. 

“The covid cleaning grant was also pulled without us being told; it was just pulled. 

“I know that we can’t be hanging on to covid grants forever, but it was one grant we thought might have stayed around. Schools, funnily enough, don’t have a grant for cleaners, and schools being resourceful, they’d get enough hours per week to keep the school sort of ok, but with this grant we actually had schools that were hygienic," he said.