Irish Examiner view: Delay reveals creaking sector

Students Tatiana Sousa, Rebecca Flynn O'Connell, Dolly Sheehan, Dina Biro, Zunaira Riaz, and Jayne Magnier celebrating their Junior Certificate results at St. Aloysius' School in Cork city. Picture: Denis Minihane.

At long last the Junior Certificate exam results have been issued, with more than 67,000 students finally getting their marks yesterday.

There’s been a lengthy delay in issuing those results, with the State Examinations Commission blaming a dramatic fall in the number of examiners: the SEC says while the number of Junior Cycle candidates numbers are up by 5% since 2019, the number of examiners has decreased by 38%.

Hence the long delay in issuing results, which are usually available soon after school resumes in September.

There are a few perspectives on this situation. One is a sense of sympathy for the Junior Cert students involved — the lengthy delay is an unfortunate introduction for those students to the world of serious examinations, having come hard on the heels of a Covid-affected couple of years in secondary school to begin with.

Then there is the apparent collapse in the number of teachers willing to correct test papers. The SEC confirmed to the Oireachtas last month that it had increased rates of pay for examiners and also called and emailed teachers directly to ask them to work as examiners; when this didn’t work the existing examiners had to take on more scripts to correct, which led to “a poor examiner experience”, as the SEC put it.

One hopes that that poor experience did not contribute to errors in marking, which would mean an even poorer experience for the students involved.

Finally, there is the wider educational context in which this delay appears. In recent months there have been concerns expressed about the apparent grade inflation in the results emerging from our universities, while there are complaints in turn from the universities about the impact of grade inflation when it comes to Leaving Certificate results.

The delay in issuing Junior Cert results is not as concerning as the reason given for that delay — the lack of examiners — but both can be solved.

However, when considered in conjunction with other apparent problems in the Irish education system, there is a sense of a sector creaking at various pressure points. And a sense that someone in authority needs to bring the sector to order before it starts to creak any louder.