Leaving Certificate English Draft Specification

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Recently the Draft Curriculum Specification for Leaving Certificate English was released for consultation by the NCCA. This is a most important moment for English teachers; such reforms take place rarely, and when they involve the terminal qualification course, everything in English teaching in schools is affected, in every year. Everyone must send in their own opinions, by Friday May 2nd at 5.00pm. Here is the online survey.

The Leaving Certificate remains a high-stakes examination, as determined by our third-level qualification system through the Central Applications Office (which is run by the universities - the Department of Education has no hand in it). So everything in the course, including classroom practice and the attitudes of students and parents, is determined by that fact, and in the process of reform there has been no indication that it will change. As I have regularly said, the rapids are still waiting at the end of the river.

Here are my previous pieces on Senior Cycle reform.

A summary of pluses and minuses:

Plus:

  • To general surprise, the written Additional Assessment Component has been reduced to 20%, which limits its exposure to cheating. But it’s still 20%.

  • It’s welcome that despite the former Minister’s insistence, this AAC will be completed by December of Sixth Year. Later would be better still, but much of the year’s work is done in the first term, and at least all non-literary writing has not been removed from Sixth Year as was foolishly mooted.

  • The biggest surprise was that a 20% oral examination will assess the comparative texts. There has been a mixed reception to this, but at least theoretically it is a good concept; our classrooms should be rich places of oracy, and assessing oral response will actually suit many students who find it hard to write at length, but who are articulate (read Conor Murphy’s positive take). Again, it is too early, however: my own Sixth Years are only really fully taking off in their understanding of the comparative, and mature articulation of this, in January/February of the final year.

  • It is welcome that there is recognition that ‘The integrated study of language and literature is central to the English specification’ (10), and that ‘engaging in exploration of one text can lead to opportunities for creative writing, analysis and comparison’.

  • As I have previously written, I think that text selection in Ireland is done quite well, certainly compared to the narrow selection of our neighbours in England. The draft specification recognises the ‘diverse society in which we live’, which has been better reflected in text choices in recent years, though the narrowing of the amount of material will make it hard to ‘engage with a range of texts’.

  • It is also welcome that there is an emphasis on ‘experiences of aesthetic pleasure’, even if these are reduced by the nature of the assessment, especially when it is spread throughout two years.

  • Many teachers feared that Shakespeare would be dropped as a compulsory element at Higher Level, but it is excellent that that has not happened.

Minus:

  • The single most important word in the document may be that this specification ‘is designed for a minimum of 180 hours of class contact time’. It is dangerous, too: individual timetabling in schools might reduce the allocation to such an unacceptable level, following on from reduction in Transition Year and the shrivelling we have seen in Junior Cycle assessment. But at least schools can make their own decisions.

  • Above, I said that the oral examination is theoretically a good idea. The minutes of the development group can be read on the NCCA site, and it seems this proposal only came up very recently in an online meeting split between January 8th and 16th:

There was an extensive discussion on the centrality of oracy to the specification and an open discussion on how this could be assessed in an authentic and equitable manner. The group developed an alternative proposal for an additional AAC where the comparative study would be assessed via an oral examination in addition to the AAC on Creative Writing.

All but one member of the development group supported this proposal, which was noted as a deviation from the agreed assessment parameters. That member was the State Examinations Commission.

The minutes of a subsequent specially-called meeting on January 20th confirmed this:

All but one of the development group members supported the proposal. The SEC was against the proposal on the basis of scale and impact on the system.

You can see why the SEC objected: running an oral exam (at Common Level) for every Fifth Year student in the country at the end of the year (late May, or during the beginning of the Leaving Cert itself?) is a gigantic undertaking. Can enough examiners be sourced? At the moment students write for about an hour+ on their comparative texts: how short will an oral exam be? And assessing this task will be so much harder than assessing the speaking and listening level of languages like Irish, French and German.

  • Bringing any form of high-stakes assessment back into Fifth Year will damage school life and student well-being (ironically, one of the Senior Cycle Guiding Principles). We repeatedly hear the canard that stress will be reduced: now watch as it is increased, with students having high-stakes AACs in all subjects across a wearing length of time, and being less willing to take part in activities crucial for well-being like sport.

  • The draft states that students will be expected to compare ‘at least two texts from the prescribed list’: ‘at least’ means that two will be the number that most schools will choose, whereas some of the most interesting and fruitful discussions come from the cross-referring across three texts. And if a school chooses one film, then a final English course is asking students to read a mere two complete books in two years (the other being the single text).

  • The current 8 poets at Higher Level will be reduced to 5. Since teachers don’t teach 8 anyhow, but make their own selection, why not leave it at 8, from which 5 can be chosen?

  • The ‘strands’ of study are peppered with dubious ‘Learning Outcomes’. The bland vagueness of these statements are entirely unhelpful, as are the Descriptors of Quality for the AACs. Professor Áine Hyland has regularly drawn attention to this issue.

  • AI remains a serious issue in the Creative Writing AAC, and there is no indication here that there will be a coherent and effective approach to it. We await detailed guidelines, but I am not optimistic. It is possible that widespread concern from teachers, subject associations and unions had an effect in the reduction of exposure to 20%, but that is still exposure. My biggest concern about AI is not so much the possibility of cheating in an assessment task, as in the backwash effect into classroom practice. If AI can help teachers with functional tasks, then work away, but I am more and more convinced it should have no place in the very heart of our practice (don’t dream of throwing ‘in the real world’ at me). And it is perfectly easy to design a task that excludes access to AI or any other form of online technology. More of my pieces on AI as it relates to English.

  • Universal Design for Learning makes an appearance on page 20. Without judgment, just a note that this is far from being universally-accepted practice.

  • There will only be one terminal written examination, and we can expect that that will be reduced in length from the current papers at 3 hours 20 minutes and 2 hours 50 minutes respectively. I will be surprised if the new single exam is longer than 2 hours 30 minutes. I have previously said that a 3 hour 20 minute writing test is too much, but examinations could be divided into shorter tests. In any case, this is part of the general reduction of the subject which saw a total of 5 hours of assessment at Higher Level in the Junior Certificate reduced to 2 hours in the Junior Cycle.

This could have been worse, but that should not distract us from stating that overall this course will be a further step in the diminishing of our subject in recent years.

For a valuable and attentive response, see what Conor Murphy wrote.

[If you’ve got this far, please now do make your own submission. ASTI members who participate in the consultation process are also requested to send a copy of their submissions to Head Office at eileen@asti.ie.]