On Senior Cycle Reform in English
There are few more emotive issues in Irish society than, absurdly, the Leaving Certificate. I write ‘absurdly’ because I know of no other country which routinely puts its age-18 terminal exams on the front pages of newspapers and TV/radio programmes as they happen. In English, this notoriously manifests itself in speculation about ‘which poets will be on’, and it would not have been surprising in the past to see a Paddy Power ad offering 5/2 Heaney, 4/1 Dickinson, 9/2 Boland, 10/1 Bishop … And why not chance a tenner at 7/2 on a character question on Lady Macbeth in the 16.40 in the Sports Hall?
Analysis of the Leaving Certificate rarely goes beyond the sloppy and uninformed. I have previously given an example of this in the lazy idea that so-called ‘rote learning’ is relevant to English, which I looked at in detail here.
The pandemic certainly didn’t dampen down the hysteria. As with so much during that dismal and still-continuing event, cool rationale was missing and hyperbole all too dominant. The turmoil that COVID-19 visited on us all did not help anyone think carefully about the Leaving Certificate. There was much ‘everything has changed and we need to throw everything overboard’. It also overlapped with the latter stages of the formal Senior Cycle review. Now the Minister for Education has given an overview of what is planned. So here are some thoughts about English in this context.
Assessment is probably the most notorious and difficult issue of all in teaching: how do I know that my pupils have learned? Assessment ranges all the way from formative (which Dylan Wiliam says might have been called responsive teaching, though that suggests it is all about the teacher) to summative, and it is the latter that the debate on the Leaving Certificate obsessively returns to.
There is only one sensible way to approach this: with the bottom line that all assessment is partial and inadequate. What we have to aim for is the least inadequate. To dig further into this, read one of the sharpest minds in education, Daisy Christodoulou, in her book Making Good Progress? The future of Assessment for Learning. This includes an analysis of the serious flaws in descriptor-based assessments, something we did not pay attention to in the reform of the Irish Junior Cycle, changes which already look limp and tired. There is an excellent review of Christodoulou’s book by Christine Counsell here which gives a good sense of the key points.
A regular call in the Irish debate has been to reduce or abolish examinations in favour of some more spread-out form of assessment. But we need to be chary of the unintended consequences: continuous assessment can increase stress and pressure on pupils and give further advantage to middle-class children from well-resourced families and schools. Examinations - again, admittedly crude and often inaccurate instruments - may turn out to be the least partial, biased and inaccurate form of summative assessment. An article from November 2021, No easy answer to the question of Leaving Cert reform, by Emma O’Kelly of RTÉ, is a well-balanced summary of the complexities involved. In it, she quotes Dalton Tattan of the Department of Education, who shows an awareness of the dangers:
Students favour this idea of continuous assessment and reduced stress for them. And that may well be the case, but I think we need to test the thinking around that, because it could also raise the temperature.
And so to yesterday’s announcement. For English, the lead news is that Paper 1 (the Language element) will be taken at the end of Fifth Year, with Paper 2 (Literature) left in its current position at the end of secondary school. There are two reasons to find this dismaying: firstly, for its impact on school life, and secondly, its impact on children’s experience of English in the classroom.
Before I get to those two matters, I should point out that there has been little deep-thinking about English as a subject in Ireland over the years, compared to our neighbours across the water, as David Didau describes in his comprehensive overview of teaching in England, Making Meaning in English. And this intellectual thinness is truly obvious today.
Has a decision to remove all Language teaching and learning from Sixth Year been informed by knowledgeable practitioners, by people who actually teach the course? As is so dismayingly common, ‘ordinary’ teachers are having curriculum and exam structures foisted on them, without them being stress-tested by experts in schools. As ‘ordinary’ teachers we get sops as contributions: we might have an online survey thrown at us (few complete these), or be told our union will represent us. But, overwhelmingly, decisions are made by official bodies and politicians, despite all the boastful talk of consultation. Very few teachers know anything that is going on until a tome drops from the Department of Education or the Minister makes an announcement. How much influence do subject associations have, such as in English the excellent INOTE? In a sensible world, subject associations would have the time, resources and power to do the planning for each subject, with the Department of Education just having oversight and sign-off. This is always embarrassingly obvious when formal official training introduces new courses (such as the Leaving Certificate 20 years ago, and the Junior Cycle more recently). Seconded and well-meaning teachers deliver uncustomisable training handed down to them by official bodies. It is never near the excellence of what we have seen online recently by volunteer teachers like Conor Murphy, Aoife O’Driscoll or Clare Madden, who design their own sessions based on their own expertise and enthusiasms. You could look further afield to teachers like Jennifer Webb and Bennie Kara in England, now available internationally - a rare pandemic silver lining.
Irish also will have an examination paper brought into Fifth Year, and it may be that this is the thin end of the wedge, with more subjects to come. The theory is: reduce the stress of terminal exams, so therefore move some earlier in the course. Ironically, the examination which requires least preparation and produces least stress in English will be the one to move. It is not being moved for pedagogical reasons, though, and the move to Fifth Year ironically reinforces the idea that the Leaving Certificate matters more than anything else. The impact on school? Even for just two subjects for the moment, this is a change that gives children less breathing space to develop intellectually, and the message is that they should reconsider how much time they give to sport, to the school musical, to the chess club. Despite the public emphasis on ‘well-being’, bringing high-stakes and possibly career-defining examinations or continuous assessment earlier in a child’s school career is likely to undermine that. Look at that relentless stream of Classroom Based Assessments across all subjects in the Junior Cycle, week after week before their pandemic-cancellations, which all too many pupils and teachers see as purposeless. If the Leaving Certificate were properly decoupled from third-level entry, then this would not matter greatly, but there has been no suggestion that that critical link will be reformed, and without such a change all other reforms mean little and are likely to be mere window-dressing. The assessment will remain high-stakes, whether in the form of examinations, continuous assessment or project work. The CAO system is waiting for students still, like rapids at the end of a river.
An additional point about moving the two papers: this change will have an impact on other subjects, particularly in the summer term. Which pupil would not prioritise English and Irish leading up to those high-stakes exams?
Now to the reasons why moving Paper 1 damages English as a subject, and reduces the experience of the pupils, counteracting one of the three official ‘tenets’ of this reform, to
enrich the student experience and build on what’s strong in our current system.
With this move, the final year becomes solely devoted to literature, plainly because that is the part of the course which needs most ‘preparation’. The ways language and literature intertwine now become essentially redundant in Sixth Year: there would be no point in setting a language task based on a character in a text, for instance. The voyage of intellectual and linguistic discovery that is learning how to write an effective short story, how to shape a powerful personal essay, how to craft an evocative descriptive piece, stops short suddenly at the end of Fifth Year. And it will stop just as pupils are learning, as they are developing, before - so often - they ‘get it’ in Sixth Year. Now that opportunity has gone, as well as the opportunity to write the kind of creative pieces that pupils enjoy as a break from literary analysis. And goodbye to our successful Article of the Week (based on Kelly Gallagher’s idea) and rich classroom discussions in Sixth Form on contemporary issues. Every year I tell my Sixth Year pupils to get out their language work from the previous year and spend an evening re-reading it. Next day in class I ask them what they think of it now. Cue embarrassed smiles. And over the following terms, as they learn, grow into young adulthood, read and write more, their writing develops. That will all go. Because of the examinations. Because third-level entry requirements trump everything else. I have a daughter in primary school: I would not dream of suggesting that the purpose of her being there is to prepare for secondary school. Too many think the same of secondary: that its purpose is instrumental, to qualify for third-level. No: the value of secondary school is complete in itself. It is not a qualifying system.
There are other elements of the announcement that I have not addressed: teacher-assessment of course is the most explosive one (again, presuming the Leaving Certificate remains high-stakes). The calculated/accredited grades recently have been a necessary emergency measure, but the dogs in the teaching street know they were massively unreliable (again, read Christodoulou). There is a new subject: Drama, Film and Theatre studies (but see Conor Murphy’s comment). Then there is this:
As Leaving Certificate subjects are gradually revised, they will have assessment components additional to the conventional written examination introduced. Under the plan, those new assessment components will be worth 40% of the total marks, with the written examination making up 60% of the final score. (Emma O’Kelly, RTÉ).
We have no idea what this would look like for English, since there is no specification. I would just warn again of the unintended consequences: the danger of widening the disadvantage gap, of spreading rather than reducing stress, and of eroding enriching elements of school life.
If you are interested, here is the Senior Cycle Review Advisory Report (68 pages. Trigger warning: much use of stakeholders), and also the other day the Inspectorate released the Chief Inspector’s Report September 2016 – December 2020, also covering the pandemic period (333 pages this time). Obviously lots of hard work has been going on in the educational world.
And meanwhile what have teachers been doing during the last two years as decisions on and judgments about their work were being made?
Well, they’ve been fearful of catching a potentially lethal virus in their freezing classrooms, they’ve been trying not to bring it home to vulnerable relatives, they’ve been catching it, they’ve been developing long COVID, they’ve been sitting in school carparks eating lunchtime sandwiches because their staff rooms have limited capacity, they’ve been struggling to teach while wearing masks and struggling to discern their students’ faces and see the hundreds of micro-expressions that help understand them, they’ve had periods of sitting in front of laptops in their bedrooms trying to learn how to teach remotely for the first time, they’ve been panicking at how to use Google Classroom and how to get material to children without internet access, they’ve been doing their best to reach out to isolated children through the medium of a screen, they’ve been managing the loss of their classroom set-ups, they’ve been teaching in echoing sports’ halls, they’ve been having incidental inspections in COVID-riddled schools, they’ve been covering for their sick colleagues, they’ve been calculating grades, and of course they’ve been doing all the things that they always do - marking essays, constructing schemes of work, enthusing their pupils about literature and drawing out their creativity.
As they will continue to do.
At the top of this post is a photograph of the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop, a writer who used language with beautiful precision, and turned her personal struggles into artistic gold: as teachers, this is what we really care about, and why we became English teachers. Engaging with this kind of beauty is what we’ve continued to do for the last two years.
As we will continue to do.
END
More: The official INOTE response to proposed changes and Conor Murphy’s personal response, ‘Bye Bye Creative Writing’. Conor Murphy has a to-and-fro about continuous assessment with Jennifer Horgan in the Examiner. Kate Barry has a damning post called Literature and Language: the Double Helix, and in this podcast from UCC Kate interviews Dr Niamh Dennehy, who coherently makes the case for keeping literature and language intertwined throughout the course (towards the end of the talk).