Gareth O'Callaghan: Ireland's education system still fails too many Leaving Cert students

Despite recent reforms, Ireland's education system still undervalues vocational skills and overlooks students who learn in different ways

The culmination of secondary school in Ireland is still a series of timed exams that rely on an ability to regurgitate precise selections of knowledge and interpretation from a massive five-year accumulation of information in multiple subjects. File picture

You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It’s a proverb often attributed to the Irish writer Jonathan Swift (although its use predates him). Swift was a scathing critic when it came to the inequality at the heart of society, including in education.

The saying suggests that you can’t turn something inferior, or ugly, into something of value, or attractive. During my school days, it was a phrase that one teacher took great pleasure in trotting out, usually when he was handing out exam results.

First, he would stare at the copy book he was holding, then at the student in question. How you did in the test determined how long he stared. A low grade meant a long humiliating stare.

“Repeat after me ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’,” he would shout as the student shrank in shame. Of course this was more personal than just a grade. 

The sow’s ear had nothing to do with the quality of the answers. It was a callous way of telling a young boy he hadn’t a hope in hell of achieving anything worthwhile in life — a way of suggesting to him that “you’re useless and you always will be”.

I knew one such boy. His name was Jim. We were both 14. Like me, maths and science were his weakest subjects. I just about managed a basic grasp of both and scraped through. He couldn’t and as a result he didn’t stand a chance.

Over time I watched as his self-esteem collapsed, gutted by a system that showed little interest in him, until one day he climbed through a ground-floor window while the teacher had his back to the class. He never came back.

In those days, no one dared to suggest that maybe it was the education system that was failing the student, and not the other way round.

I recall a father at a parent-teacher appraisal who sat there listening as the science teacher informed him that his daughter spent all her time in class daydreaming. “Maybe she’s just not interested in science,” her father replied.

Square peg, round hole.

Allowing for some structural changes and the odd brush stroke to a colossus of a curriculum, the culmination of secondary school in Ireland is still a series of timed exams that rely on an ability to regurgitate precise selections of knowledge and interpretation from a massive five-year accumulation of information in multiple subjects.

You can butter it up whatever way you want, but that’s the reality of our education system. Is it a fair one? It depends on what you take the concept of fairness to mean, and what the primary aim of our education system should be. 

Is a series of final exams a fair assessment of skill and ability? And what does that even mean? Who is being assessed for what?

Leaving Cert revisions

Last September, the most significant reforms to the Leaving Cert began, following years of planning. Hands-on learning and real-world applications in the seven traditional subjects are central to these changes. 

Time had also come to push over in the bed to make room for two new subjects — climate action & sustainable development; and drama, film & theatre studies.

One of the main focuses in the revised system is more emphasis on additional assessment components such as projects, practical work, and student performance, which make up 40% of a student’s marks. 

Will that make students 40% less stressed overall when it comes to sitting the formal exams? 

Of course not, and that’s why this new system will likely make little difference to how some students view the process.

Britain’s new education secretary Lucy Powell, commenting in The Times last week, said that schools in the UK are stuck in a “straitjacket” of putting English, maths, and science first, causing children to be labelled a “failure again and again”. 

She has a valid point.

Education prejudice

Whether we like to believe it or not, education prejudice is sewn into the national psyche when it comes to the Leaving Cert results. Many students (and parents) dreams of eight H1s, but on average less than 10 realise that dream annually.

Nor is it what modern second-level education should be about. Or is it? Part of me believes it still is and will be for a long time to come, despite reassurances from teachers about change.

What teacher doesn’t want to have an eight H1-grade student in his or her class?

Let’s talk about the Matthew effect, a theory that suggests those who possess advantages or resources tend to accumulate even more, while those with fewer resources fall further behind.

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Let’s compare colleges with top-class facilities, and resources to employ counsellors for mental health issues and lab specialists for science projects, to those that have to resort to cake sales and annual raffles to replace a broken boiler pump or repair a leaking roof. Chalk and cheese.

And what about the student who has no clear path in mind?

I was blessed to come from a stable home life. My parents gave me the space I needed to study. They supported my schooling in whatever way they could. 

Despite the slog, I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do when I finished school. It was simply knowledge without a vision. It meant nothing at the time.

How many students these days take climate action and sustainable development seriously enough to study the subject for an exam? Yes, it’s hugely important, but why not introduce relationship values as a subject instead? 

Call it an emphasis on the hierarchy of what’s personally important. How to spot manipulative and abusive behaviour and create a safer environment strikes me as more relevant to a young teenager than climate action, which can come later.

Sociology and anthropology are also more crucial now than ever, and should also be considered as a subject. Learning about cultures, race, and gender theories. These are topics that teenagers go to on their phones, so why not include them on a syllabus?

Further education

Of course there’s another elephant in the room, and that’s the CAO entry system.

It needs a radical overhaul, with more opportunities for apprenticeships or other entry pathways that currently don’t exist, rather than the race for points.

Does the system treat all students’ talents and preferences equally? Of course it doesn’t; and that is where it fails so many.

Powell said that British schools should be able to pursue academic excellence as well as high-quality vocational training. It has to be the same here.

Why should students with vocational skills be considered to have lower ambitions?

When sixth year ends, it all comes down to how you adapt to learning how to live after you walk out through those school gates for the last time. 

UK prime minister Andy Burnham’s message last week to schools was to adapt their curriculums to the needs of local businesses. Vocational skills are as valuable — if not more so — as university educations.

Irish schools need to start sending out that message too. Many students are not hardwired for the intensity of exams, for learning poems by rote or a language that serves no significance, for cramming, or for the humiliation of failing.

Our curriculum might be changing, but the experience of school remains joyless for those caught in the education straitjacket.

Rigid timetables and enforced conformity might be acceptable to those with their sights set on medicine or accountancy, but for those who are “good with their hands”, as my tech teacher said, or for the daydreamer, the system remains alienating.

In the words of Swift, it’s useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

My old school pal Jim went on to run a hugely successful construction firm in London. Not bad for a 14-year-old who left school through a classroom window.