Leaving Certificate 2020 Calculated Grades: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2020-10-01
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Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (LAB), Dublin Bay North

Everybody in the House would accept that the Minister has had a lot on her plate. She tried to reopen schools and deal with a lot of inherited messes on her desk. Nobody is suggesting for a second that all of this is her fault.
There are things she has to address in the coming time. She has to address too-large class sizes in primary and secondary schools. A teaching union is balloting for industrial action because of the nature of what is going on in second level schools. She has to sort out pay inequality. She has to provide proper pay and conditions for school secretaries. Her Department has to begin to deal with special needs assistants in a more respectful manner and vindicate the rights of children with special educational needs to get a school place. There is a huge amount on her agenda.
In terms of the leaving certificate, from the beginning people in opposition had strong views on this and were not listened to. The then spokesperson on education, and current Minister of State, Deputy Thomas Byrne, said in a tweet that the written exam should be cancelled. We in the Labour Party said from the beginning that we did not agree with that assessment because we were completely unconvinced that a proper, fair and robust manner could be found to replace the leaving certificate in such a short amount of time.
From the off we said that school profiling was a bad idea. It should have been deleted by the Minister's officials immediately but it was not. To her credit, she recognised it was wrong after the debacle in the United Kingdom and deleted it at the last second. That timeline is part of the problem. I had to force out of the Minister in the Dáil an admission that the leaving certificate result date was being delayed until 7 September because of the calculated grades system. I have come to the conclusion that if school profiling had been deleted earlier in the process, the process would have been more robust.
The Minister engaged the services of this crowd, Polymetrika, without a procurement process or tender document. This process was overseen by a national standardisation group and an independent steering committee. A Dr. Janet Brown was appointed as the external reviewer. The Minister relied on the work of Polymetrika International. Apparently, one individual, who is the head of the Northern Ireland Council for the Curriculum, Examinations & Assessment, CCEA, was on the steering committee. At the same time he was apologising for the Northern Ireland debacle, he was signing off on the system in the Republic.
The Department of Education and Skills placed the dreams, ambitions, emotions and mental health of 61,000 young people in the hands of their teachers and then Polymetrika. Guess who we could trust? We could trust the teachers. The body that the Minister employed to do this work obviously made a mistake. Was the system not road-tested immediately? Did the Department not say that this is the first time in the history of the State that we are not having a written examination, and therefore we have to road-test this system?
Some of the commentary from other Government spokespersons was to the effect that mistakes and these things happen. It is a bit like a builder telling someone a mistake with the foundations was made, but 95% of the house is fine. There seems to be an attitude that these things happen, mistakes happen and we can all just move on.
One of the biggest educational decisions ever made was the decision not to go ahead with a written leaving certificate. One would imagine that the momentous nature of that decision would have reverberated throughout the Department of Education and Skills so that there was no possibility that an error could have come into play. Yet, two of them surfaced. After all of this, 6,500 students will have their grades changed and improved.
I have a number of questions. The Minister said, in what was a remarkable statement from a Minister for Education and Skills but is a statement of fact, that there are students who will not be able to attend the course they have legitimately obtained through this system because of an error from the Department of Education and Skills. That is a devastating thing for somebody to hear.
Deputies told the Minister about this timeline. We told her that it was wrong for students to get their school-based assessments and see the differential between that and their final grade after the CAO offers came out. We told the Minister that was a mistake because at that stage it was too late to appeal.
What is the Department planning to do for the cohort of students who may have already set up shop or made a decision to spend three or four years living in Galway, Cork, Limerick or Dublin and now discover, because of the Department's foul up, that their lives will now be completely different? Is the Minister going to say that these things happen, it will only affect them for a year, mistakes happen and that is the way goes?
The Government was told from the off that a system of calculated grades was not a small decision. It is not something that somebody tweeted about and then decided that somebody else could sort out the ramifications. It was a monumental decision. When one includes the fact that school profiling was included and then taken out, the decision was taken so late that the system could not then correct itself in time for the results to come out.
The CAO results came out and students did not know that there were discrepancies between the school based assessment and what the Polymetrika bunch had churned out.
Now we understand that her Department does not trust anybody. It does not trust her Cabinet colleagues or anybody in the education sphere because nobody knew this was coming. Nobody from the third level institutions, the students union bodies or the teacher unions knew this was coming. Obviously, the Department of Education and Skills does not trust anybody. It certainly could not tell us but it could not tell anybody about what was coming.
Let us forget about the political system for a second and focus on the young people and those who are going to be hurt most by this. In the minute or so the Minister has left to respond to me, can she address one central issue? The Minister is a compassionate and capable politician who is going to deliver much good change in the education system over the coming period of time. Many of the things she has done in her short period of time in office have benefited children and young people across the land in getting back into school buildings. I want to work with the Minister to achieve more. What is the Minister going to say to somebody who discovers over the coming days that he or she is stuck in Galway when he or she wanted to be in Limerick or some other place? What practical support is the Minister going to give that person because telling him or her that there was a mistake and the Government is sorry is not going to cut it?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2020-10-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:48:38+00:00
Sitting date: 2020-10-01