Irish Examiner view: We need a radical overhaul of our CAO system

Need to move away from our 'obsession with institutions' and focus on career pathways

Students are under a lot of pressure to get enough points for a third-level place.

There will be many words of reassurance for the 60,000-plus students who receive their Leaving Cert results today and yet, despite the platitudes, the media glare will invariably focus on the record-breakers and straight-A candidates.

Those achievements certainly deserve to be singled out, particularly in a rollercoaster pandemic year that comes to an end for the class of 2021 with likely grade inflation and an unprecedented demand on college places.

Some 4,500 extra third-level places have been added but that won’t be enough to satisfy the hopes of this year’s record 84,000 CAO applicants.

The unbearable pressure on students has been a heated subject for decades but there is reason to hope that an end to the so-called points race might finally be in sight.

For one, Minister for Higher and Further Education Simon Harris is vehemently against it. “I want to end this points race,” he said on Thursday. 

He has promised a radical overhaul of the CAO system and a move away from our “obsession with institutions”, as he put it, to focus on career pathways.

For those who will be bitterly disappointed today, he had this to say: 

Whatever your results… there are so many ways for you to get to where you want to go.

That may or may not console. Sadly, disappointment has been a feature of this time of year for decades because our education system is designed to measure potential in grades and then pit student against student for a limited number of third-level places.

But change can come, and more quickly than anyone imagined possible. We saw that over the last challenging year when students were offered an opportunity to sit exams as well as receive accredited grades. They could opt for either or both — most opted for the latter — and be awarded the highest result.

It was a measure for exceptional times but it is one that should continue after the pandemic as it provides a safety net that eases the stress, anxiety, and pressure of one-off exams.

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If there is a real willingness to end the folly of allowing results in a single exam determine the lives of so many students, it should be accompanied by a wider review of our education system. 

An information-focused, exam-oriented system has benefits but it does not do enough to equip young people for an ever-changing world. 

How best can we prepare today’s students to cope with a pandemic and its aftermath and the challenges of climate breakdown? Many of them will go on to work in jobs that don’t even exist yet.

They will need resilience, curiosity, creativity, critical thinking; attributes that are too often stifled in the rigid structure of exams. 

It’s a breath of fresh air, then, to hear that the National Gallery of Ireland has rolled out a new cultural outreach programme to post-primary schools. It is a small but encouraging start.

Meanwhile, to all those receiving results today, it is glib to tell them that grades don’t matter. It might be more heartening to tell the ones coming after them that change is on the way. Let’s hope it will be radical and far-reaching.