VAR and Leaving Certificate English
What does football’s Video Assistant Referee system have to do with the impending reform of the Leaving Certificate in Ireland?
Here you go.
Last weekend I finished Daisy Christodoulou’s new book, I Can’t Stop Thinking About VAR. It’s an excellent read for anyone interested in sport, and technology, and more besides. And entertaining, too: here she is on the absurd contortions VAR has generated, as she analyses a disallowed ‘goal’ by Raheem Sterling:
Sterling is rapid. His top speed is just over 30 kph. He wasn’t going this fast for this ‘goal’, though; let’s say he was going at just 15kph. That’s about 4 metres per second, which is about 8 centimetres every 0.02 seconds. So in our 0.02 seconds of uncertainty, where we are not sure if Silva has touch the ball or not, Sterling has moved about 8 centimetres. And yet he was deemed by VAR to have been offside by 2.4 centimetres.
Daisy Christodoulou is best-known in the educational world as a coolly precise thinker on issues such as assessment (in her book Making Good Progress?). During the initial tech-deluge at the start of the pandemic in 2020 I commented on her book Teachers vs Tech.
At the recent researchED Belfast conference as the keynote speaker, she returned to her book The Seven Myths of Education, which she had also discussed in her keynote at the first researchED Dublin in 2019 which I helped organise. In Belfast, she wondered why zombie educational myths such as the ones she identified over 10 years ago (e.g. ‘you can always Google it’) persist and indeed even flourish anew.
As well as being Director of Education at No More Marking, Daisy is a West Ham supporter, and from this angle has turned her attention to the biggest change in football in living memory, the VAR system which is now widespread across international football, and which started in England’s Premier League in 2019. As she writes,
Many fans, players and managers are sick to death of it … far from overcoming its teething problems its flaws seem only to have increased over time.
and
VAR has since come to seem a symbol of the general contempt with which football’s authorities treat match-going fans.
Other sports such as tennis and cricket, and two sports I watch a lot, rugby and hockey, have had their controversies, but in none of those does it feel like their technical assessment system has perverted the core of the game itself. Dismayingly, in football players are increasingly hesitant to celebrate goals with confidence and, as described by Jonathan Wilson in his preface, VAR has regularly ruined the experience of fans in the stadium. And yet the idea was to make decisions more accurate and pre-empt frustration and injustice. Goal-line technology works almost perfectly, and therefore
The success of GLT reassured people that technology in football could work and paved the way for its greater use. If it could work so well with goal-line decisions, it seemed reasonable to assume that it would work well with offsides, too.
But VAR has deeply disturbed the professional game (amateurs can continue happily playing in the parks without such complications):
The problem isn’t that VAR is inaccurate. It is that it is too accurate. We are back to the same problem we had with handball and penalties: VAR is more accurate than the previous system, and its accuracy is revealing things about reality that we don’t like.
So, the Leaving Certificate exam?
In the last couple of days there has been a lot in the Irish media about reforms to the Leaving Certificate system in Ireland, prompted by a union push to get this issue in front of the public during the campaign for the recently-called Generation Election on November 29th.
Here is another case in which a well-meaning attempt to improve the experience of ‘users’ (fans/players, pupils/teachers) has gone pear-shaped. Instead of designing a system that is derived from the first principles of the subject, a core element of English like creative writing is going to be downgraded and degraded for the purposes of third-level qualification. An AAC in English with creative writing looks likely to be at the end of Fifth Year, the worst possible moment to have it, while pupils are still developing their voices and expanding their styles (more from Conor Murphy). Someone has decided that this will reduce stress on them, a canard that needs full exposure and rebuttal. In fact, as with the other AACs in the several subjects candidates take, other countries’ experience shows that this will spread stress further and deeper, worst of all into a year previously without high-stakes assessment tasks. And that does not even address the apparently impossible matter of the use of GenAI, which I wrote about in the Irish Times recently, and which is likely to render the English AAC meaningless. There is a set of different problems in Science, as my colleague Humphrey Jones explained on the Pat Kenny radio show.
Once changes like this are afoot, they are difficult to reverse. This has proven the case with VAR (Wolverhampton Wanders failed in an attempt to remove it from the Premier League, though Sweden are holding firm), which has become more and more contorted, and I am sceptical that anything will improve the proposed Leaving Certificate across all subjects. The defining force in educational reforms in Ireland is always sunk cost fallacy, the cognitive bias which means that politicians, civil servants and educational quangos by instinct dig their heels in, and later double-down on a process. The obvious example is the Junior Cycle, which is seen as a failure by parents and teachers, and a ‘roaring success’ by the educational establishment. It is a rare person in authority who ever has the courage to say Hold on a moment. Let’s look more clearly at this.
As Daisy Christodoulou points out in both this book on VAR and in Making Progress?, all assessment systems are flawed. We just need to find the least flawed ones. We need to be very careful what we design, because the tendency in education is that assessment has a backwash effect on teaching and learning. The introduction of unsupervised and unverifiable AACs to the Leaving Certificate is bound to inject a highly unreliable and inequitable element to it. In Christodoulou’s words on VAR, we are likely to end up with the educational equivalent of
the worst of both worlds: reduced common sense and reduced consistency.
A uniform 40% is going to be applied to almost all Leaving Certificate subjects. Why? Why cannot the needs of each subject determine the allocation? So it would be appropriate for 40% or more to be applied to an oral examination in a language, or a performance practical in music, or a drama performance in the new Drama, Film and Theatre Studies course. But why does that mean that English must also have 40%, including ‘projects’ at which students can cheat? It would be reasonable and proportionate for 20% of English to be done as a writing task in a supervised environment without access to online technology close to the end of the course, say in April of Sixth Year for the major composition.
But never forget sunk cost fallacy … it is sadly more likely that an idea born out of intellectual poverty will go ahead, and pupils in future will suffer a reduced version of our subject, its method of assessment compromising it just as VAR has bled football of some of its simple spontaneous joy.
As I write, the general election is coming close, and at the end of next week we will go to ballot stations. Possibly, though I won’t be holding my breath, a new Minister of Education will have the clarity and courage to say: Hold on a moment. Let’s look more clearly at this.