The A-level results were released, this week, in the United Kingdom. The third week of August has always been the traditional date for students in that country to discover their fates, and the release of the results usually leads to the scramble to confirm university places, secure accommodation, and all of the other rites of passage preceding that exciting first year at third level.
In Ireland, as with many things post independence, this is a tradition we have kept going. The leaving cert results were always released within a few days of the A-levels, and there’s a set of rituals to those, too: RTE coverage featuring the happy students, a feature on that one nerd, usually from Cork, who got all 600 available points, and a slew of newspaper columns about what to do if you didn’t get your first CAO choice.
Not this year.
This year, because of the Department of Education’s enforced decision, through a lack of examiners, to delay the results, Irish students must wait until September 2nd to learn their fates. For those aiming to attend Irish third level institutions, this is an inconvenience, and a problem: It leaves a much shorter time to acquire already-scarce accommodation, and vastly less time before the start of the new third level terms for students to make decisions about whether to accept or refuse an offer of a place.
It is worse, though, for the significant number of Irish students who had hoped to attend University in the UK.
This cohort is by no means a majority, or even a very large group – but every year hundreds and thousands of Irish young people apply through the UCAS system in the UK for places in UK colleges, either in Northern Ireland, or on the British mainland. Those students, this year, have been placed at enormous disadvantage.
That is because in the absence of their results, the college places they had their eyes on are being assigned to British students who already have their results. Irish students who have applied for the same places must wait, and hope that when their own results are released in several weeks that there will be some spare places left over for them. They are at a particular disadvantage when it comes to sourcing accommodation, since UK students, again, have uncontested first dibs over all the available housing. The Department of Education has made life harder for all students, but this cohort, especially, have good reason to be steaming mad.
This has all been caused, as mentioned, by a severe shortage of teachers willing to give up their summer to mark exams. For much of the final few months of last year, the State Exams Commission was practically begging teachers to do the job, and received an unprecedented cold shoulder. This was not a result of any industrial action, nor any ill-will on behalf of teachers: The simple fact is that fewer and fewer teachers consider it worth their while to give up chunks of their summer to mark exams. Further, the fewer that agree, the worse it gets, because the more work falls on each individual teacher. The remuneration is poor, the hours are long, and the thanks and public recognition are non-existent.
But this has been a growing problem for several years now, and the state exams commission and the Department of Education have done little about it. In fact, observers who can put two and two together might note, their solution has not been to recruit more examiners on better pay, but to consider abolishing the exams as they are altogether: The new Junior Cert cycle, for example, famously has teachers marking their own students. This is presented as some kind of advancement of progressive education, when in reality it’s the Department’s solution for a reduction in the number of examiners. Paying them more doesn’t seem to have been widely considered. This is because, in fact, abolishing exams as we know it is their favoured policy, in the Department of Education, and they’ve been open about that for some time.
There is a very clear direction of travel in Irish education policy now, in fact, towards abolishing the leaving cert as we know it altogether. You do not have to be a genius to see how this will play out: In a few years, some hapless Minister will be handed talking points by one of the Department’s civil servants, who seem mostly to make their policy independent of the Government. That document will say things like “and of course, classroom-based assessment has been a tremendous success at Junior level, and students have responded well to it”. It will say things like “This is consistent with our policy towards moving away from a pressurized exam situation for students”. It will not say things like “we can’t get examiners any more, and this is our workaround”.
The very future of the leaving cert is under threat. A cynic might even suggest that the Department of Education is comfortable with the long delays to results this summer on the basis that those delays can later be cited as a reason for changing the whole thing, as they’ve wanted to do for years anyway. Civil servants are not immune to allowing the occasional scandal to develop, simply so that a pre-written solution can then be pushed out to a Minister eager to distract.
Not, of course, that anyone would ever suggest that an inexperienced Minister like Norma Foley would be being played like a fiddle by career civil servants. Perish the thought.
But if Irish students this summer feel hard done by, they have just cause to do so.