On Senior Cycle reform in English: follow-up

It is now ten months since I wrote this piece on Senior Cycle reform in English, specifically the proposal to change the course dramatically by assessing the language element of it after just one year, announced out of the blue by the Minister to the surprise of everyone else in post-primary education.

We are now approaching the time of the year when next year’s course is published by the Department of Education, and here are some follow-up thoughts and an assessment of where we are as we get close to decision time. A lot has been written since last March, and it is time to take stock.

A summary of the key points in the original post: a move to continuous assessment is likely to spread, not alleviate, student-stress / moving Paper 1 to Fifth will increase stress at a time when teenagers are one year short in their intellectual, psychological and emotional development at the end of school (a long time at that point of life) / removing all Language work from the final year strips the course of fruitful interplay with Literature and ends all creative writing half way through the course / the subject association INOTE was not consulted about a fundamental change to English teachers’ practice / no attempt has been made to deal with the CAO problem (the rapids are still there at the end of the river), and any form of assessment will always be governed by the high stakes at the end / the substantial writing and intellectual development for Paper 1 which currently takes place in Sixth will not be assessed in the future / school life, including extracurricular activities like sport and drama, and thus student well-being, will be damaged / the advantage gap for middle-class will be exacerbated (the Matthew Effect) / and after all that, stress will not be reduced anyhow since the vast majority of learning preparation is for Paper 2 (Literature).
I also wrote an abbreviated version for the Leader magazine of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals (September 22 issue), which you can read here.
In the same issue of Leader, Professor Áine Hyland wrote about ‘the re-imagined Senior Cycle’. Her key points follow. The Minister went beyond recommendations by the NCCA Advisory Report on Senior Cycle (which did not propose moving the Irish and English papers). As well as objections from INOTE and An Gréasán, ten Irish language organisations stated that the proposal to assess some of the skills (of the Irish syllabus) at the end of 5th year is at variance with good practice relating to integration in language teaching. Discovered under a Freedom of Information request from Conradh na Gaeilge: the State Examinations Commission raised similar concerns months before the announcement. The SEC pointed out that decoupling the two papers (Mathematics was also under consideration) would be inappropriate, since the syllabus in all subjects is integrated. And a juicy sentence, given what the ISSU has just said (see below): Minister Foley has emphasised that the student voice will in future have to heard when the curriculum is reformed. At the researchED conference in September 2022 in the main hall at my school Professor Hyland gave a compelling account of her analysis (slides here).
In November 2021 RTÉ’s education correspondent Emma O’Kelly wrote an interesting report on the Senior Cycle which everyone should read. At a JMB conference, Dalton Tatton, Assistant Secretary of the Department, expressed his caution about some reform ideas, and Andrea Feeney, CEO of the SEC, commented on the danger of over-hasty decisions. Mr Tatton wisely warned that continuous assessment can lead to an increase in stress in pupils (also, see below on the integrity of such assessment). Tread very carefully, they warned, getting this right is too important, and there is no easy answer. In March 2022 there was no treading carefully.
The correspondence between INOTE and the Minister can be read on its website.
From the then-President of INOTE, Conor Murphy, a piece called ‘Bye Bye Creative Writing’, a version of which was published in the Irish Times, ‘We’re about to deny Leaving Cert students the chance to develop their own voice.’
Last week the Irish Second Level Students Union expressed coherent reservations. ISSU President Caitlin Faye Maniti said that while it has campaigned for Leaving Cert reform, the planned changes would not lead to better outcomes. Their concerns include lack of information, lack of stakeholder consultation (sound familiar?) and an inadequate time frame for implementation. She added With so many gaps in the plan …we simply cannot support this plan. ISSU and the TUI addressed the matter at the end of last week, and the ASTI will do so in a few weeks.
In November I wrote a piece on the first University of Limerick report on the Junior Cycle. That report was published as the first part of an on-going 4-year longitudinal study. The announcement on Paper 1 was made 6 months before the first real assessment of the introduction of the Junior Cycle. It is a widespread assumption by post-primary teachers around the country that no lessons have been learned from that roll-out, and that a reformed Senior Cycle will embed errors in the JC, reducing the quality of the Leaving Certificate.
Last week Gael Linn joined the conversation with a 7-day statement of core objections about the Irish course: 40% of marks already go to the oral component, reducing pressure in Sixth Year / there is no sign of any in-service training or sample examination papers / no research has been conducted on the suitability of these changes for the teaching of the language / any such changes should take place in tandem with a new Senior Cycle specification / the natural language acquisition process would be severely hindered, with different language skills artificially segregated / this shows there is no strategic plan for the teaching of Irish / and We are in favour of changes that will improve the system of teaching Gaeilge. This change will not improve anything.
Shane Ó Coinn, Chairperson of An Gréasán do Mhúinteoirí Gaeilge (the subject association for teachers of Irish) wrote in the Irish Examiner: This plan was packaged as an interim measure as part of the overall reform of Senior Cycle, under the apparent auspices of reducing pressure on students, as it will be a number of years before noticeable reform at Senior Cycle takes place. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that this proposal will reduce pressure on students. On the contrary, there is much evidence to suggest that this is not an educationally sound decision and that it will adversely affect student outcomes.

Other problems:

The regular one about teachers assessing their own students (ahead of us, though not relevant to the Paper 1 issue). Unions will resist this strongly, especially for a high-stakes qualification: everyone accepted at the time that calculated/accreditated grades were an emergency response to the pandemic, and that they would not be repeated.
Those in schools which do not have Transition Year, or who individually skip it, will have three years in a row of state examinations in English and Irish.
Leaving Certificate preparation will inevitably wash backwards into the Transition Year (currently this is rightly not permitted).
There are concerns that the change will disadvantage boys in particular, given their tendency to mature later than girls.
Marking is a major issue, as seen last summer with the Leaving Certificate, and with the dismaying five-month wait for Junior Cycle results. For one year only, it is true, but in June 2024 there will be three papers to mark and process - Papers 1 and 2 for the Sixth Year, and Paper 1 for Fifth. There are also rumours that unions may advise against marking Fifth Year Paper 1, which would cripple the process. The system is not coping as it is. Apparently we have to have all examinations crammed into three weeks, and no-one can design a timetable that spreads these out over more time at the natural ends of courses.
The idea of more continuous assessment (it tends to be based on projects like the History Research Study Report) comes at a particularly bad time for such an idea (the permanent problem with CA again - the Matthew Effect exacerbating the advantage gap). At the end of November last year the third iteration of ChatGPT was launched to the public; it is said that the fourth iteration will blow this out of the water, and it will only become still more powerful. Universities are moving more quickly to think about this, but our post-primary system would be very naive if it thinks that the 40% outside the supervised examination hall can be accurately assessed in the AI world. Breda O’Brien wrote about this in the Irish Times recently, the ‘ultimate plagiarism tool’ (though strictly speaking it is not plagiarism): ChatGPT has serious implications for the proposed review of the Senior Cycle, which will rely much more heavily on non-examination elements such as essays and coursework. The integrity of these alternative forms of assessment will be impossible to guarantee. It would be reckless for any proposed reform to fail to take that into account. As Carl Hendrick says, In terms of education, the exponential power of AI is rapidly outstripping our ability to monitor and evaluate it for assessment purposes.

The future?

If you come from outside Ireland, you are surely now thinking along these lines: Well, obviously if teachers with deep expertise in Irish and English, their subject associations, teaching unions, students themselves, distinguished academics, and members of the state bodies running education and the exam system are not proposing these changes and in some cases are vigorously opposing them, they couldn’t possibly happen? Just look at the sober, thoughtful, well-informed criticism by all those people: is there anyone who actually thinks this would be a good idea?

In a totally different context, years ago the BBC presenter Robin Day prompted the rapid exit of UK Defence Secretary John Nott from the TV studio by famously referring to him as a transient here-today-and-gone-tomorrow-politician. Day was right - politicians have only one priority, their political prospects, and then they move on. It is a rare one who has the courage to admit he/she was wrong, and reverse course. It is called ‘sunk cost fallacy’:

the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial. [Oxford Dictionary].

Students are heavily invested in their courses and assessments as they sit them. Teachers are heavily invested in the courses we teach over our careers, sometimes for decades: we are not here-today-and-gone tomorrow. We presume that a bottom line is that we prepare our pupils as well as possible for their examinations, but that is not the limit of our ambitions for them: we want and deserve well-designed courses which open up the joys of our subject to a full range of abilities. The Leaving Certificate English course is not perfect, and if I were put in charge of reform it would look different, but it is something that as a teacher I can work with and within. As a professional I can respect it. Any changes have to be carefully thought-through and must be based on an intellectual understanding of the subject itself, rather than being an administrative response to the conveniences of an assessment system.

Over the last 10 months deep consideration has been given to the central proposal by many intelligent and well-informed people, and it has been found wanting by almost everyone.

All except one. Around her the lone and level sands stretch far away.

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