Leaving certificate students will attend school for three days a week, while the rest of secondary school years will study from home for the next month, the government announced today.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin said in a press conference today that schools were safe for students, and that the problem was instead with the mobilisation of students.
There are almost 60,000 leaving certificate students at present.
Minister for Education Norma Foley said at the press conference that while schools were “safe environments”, there was “far too much movement in society”, and that that was why the decision to close schools for most students was made.
The leaving certificate exams are set to move forward in June as usual. Foley noted that leaving certificate exams were “successfully” run in November, “without a hitch, without a glitch”.
She added that “it is the overwhelming wish of all that we would return to the traditional leaving certificate”.
“The shared objective of all that we would achieve the traditional leaving certificate”, she continued, adding that “for all of those reasons and others, the decision has been taken to facilitate the leaving certificate students to return to school”.
Last year was an unsteady one for leaving certificate students.
In May, the government announced that the 2020 leaving certificate exams would not take place and that students would be given the option to receive calculated grades or sit their exams at a later date.
The calculated grades were awarded to students on the basis of a number of factors – such as class rankings, students’ performance in previous assessments and other indicators.
Leaving certificate results shot up as a result under the new calculated grades system compared to the previous year.
Compulsory subjects all saw bumps in the number of highest grades awarded. In Irish, the the number of H1s this year went up from 6.1 per cent last year to 9.1 per cent. H1s in English increased from 3 per cent to 4.3 per cent, and H1s awarded in mathematics increased 2 per cent from 6.4 per cent to 8.4 per cent.
Due to a coding error, however, thousands of students were awarded incorrect grades, leading the government to offer students a place in a course they originally missed out on, if their new grades met the requirements for that course.
In a press statement at the time, Minister for Education Norma Foley said: “I want to say how sorry I am that this has happened. My immediate priority is to fix the errors and their consequences so that students get their correct grades.”
