Higher Education Minister Simon Harris has said that a decision on the leaving certificate needs to be made by the end of the month, as pressure mounts on the government to scrap the in-person exams.
Harris yesterday said that students needed clarity on whether or not exams would be cancelled, a move the government has been opposing since the number of coronavirus cases spiked after Christmas.
“We’re going to need to map out exactly how that’s going to happen,” he said, according to the Irish Examiner. “We actually have to say the Leaving Cert is going to happen and here’s how it’s going to happen; here’s what’s going to happen in a safe way.”
“Ideally, we’d like to see that detail… by the end of the month or very early February. There isn’t a long window here, but the minister has been fair enough. She set up an advisory group. She’s working extremely hard on this.”
The leaving certificate was a thorn in the side of Minister for Education Norma Foley in 2020, and this year is no different.
Earlier this month, Foley had to u-turn on plans to allow sixth-year students into school three days a week, after teachers’ unions threatened to revolt.
She maintains, however, that the leaving certificate will go ahead in person.
In a press conference on January 7th, the minister said that leaving certificate exams were “successfully” run in November, “without a hitch, without a glitch”.
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.”
