Leaving Certificate 2020 Calculated Grades: Statements Dail Éireann — 2020-10-01 ============================================================ Gary Gannon (SD), Dublin Central The comments, criticisms and potentially the frustration I am expressing are not aimed personally at the Minister but rather collectively, at the Government of the day, the Department and indeed the ideology that has left our system of education crumbling at the seams at this moment. I was interested in the Minister’s opening address. Yesterday was again a very difficult day for leaving certificate 2020 students. She rectified the situation at the end when she acknowledged that this leaving certificate year had been an awful year, as a whole. It would be remiss of me if I did not go through the timeline of what has been experienced by leaving certificate students in 2020 to encapsulate the full horrors of what they have experienced. Schools closed on 13 March. On 19 March the orals were cancelled, although they were due to take place a short time later, between 23 March and 3 April. On 8 May, the leaving certificate was cancelled, although it was due to start on 3 June, and was replaced by a model, including standardisation and historical data. On 16 July an announcement was made that the results would come three weeks later than scheduled. On 1 September the school historical data was removed and on 7 September the results were issued. Yesterday an announcement was made that there had also been a cock-up in the results. I accept mistakes can be made. What is massively frustrating for me, probably for other Members of the Opposition and for people who have been commenting, asking for changes to be made and highlighting flaws and inadequacies in the system almost since March, was that at every one of those steps and every time we highlighted flaws we were met by expressions of great confidence. We were informed that everything would be okay on the day by both the Minister and her predecessor. It was only at the eleventh hour that an announcement was made that things were going to change, and that the commentary and the suggestions made by opposition parties and leading experts in the field of education, which had been made all the way through, were being acknowledged. That was grotesquely unfair to the students and to the Opposition. If there had been parliamentary scrutiny, some of the flaws that have been revealed today could have been discovered. If governance in this country is to follow the script given by the Department, to show up and cut ribbons and to get a small bit of pork barrel for our constituencies, then it is flawed and unacceptable. In many ways, it has rendered us in the situation we are in. I have some questions on the leaving certificate process but before I put those, I want to acknowledge that in our education system now, some very dark clouds are gathering, which we can all understand. My colleague, Deputy Ó Ríordáin, touched on these a minute ago. I do not have the confidence that the Department and the leadership there now have the capacity or the ability to address the dark clouds that are gathering on a multitude of fronts, which I want to touch on now. The Fórsa union showed up at the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, today to engage in discussions on the school secretaries. It was met by blockages. There were retrograde steps as to the relationship that had broken down----- --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. 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