OPINION: Decision to cancel Leaving Cert is shortsighted and creates bigger problems down the road

The Leaving Cert will go ahead 'by hook or by crook'. The words of Leo Varadkar when speaking about the exams in early April.

That was just over a month ago and the situation with Covid-19 in Ireland has improved dramatically since then. So why the sudden u-turn? Was it really in the interest of public health or was the decision to cancel the Leaving Cert this year a capitulation of epic proportions to an organised pressure campaign?

If Leo and Education Minister Joe McHugh had stood firm, there is no reason the exams could not have gone ahead. Instead, they took the easy way out and bowed to pressure which does not augur well for the rest of our response to the pandemic.

They have described the alternative system put in place as 'fair and equitable' when it is nothing even close. The fairest way would have been to pick a date, stick to it and give the students the clarity they were hoping for.

There was nothing to stop the exams going ahead with the necessary social distancing measures in place. It would have meant drafting in more supervisors, using more classrooms or even alternative venues (there's a lot of hotel ballrooms and community centres going spare at the minute) but if the political will had been there, the exams, at least the majority of them, could have gone ahead.

Yes, it would have put more pressure on students (who will forever be from THAT year) but now that pressure, if predicted grades are used, has been gladly passed from government to teachers with another set-piece address from the overused government podium. Pontius Pilate himself would have been proud of the skilful way it was done.

There's no doubt the pressure on our teachers is about to increase tenfold.

Whatever spin Joe and his PR team put on it, all that was missing was another uplifting quote from Seamus Heaney, the process to be applied for students to be given the option of Calculated Grades or to sit the examinations is a phenomenal bodge job.

There is one gem of a line of government speak and spin in the plan outlined. I mean if there was an Oscar for saying nothing, this would be in the running.

Grades given by teachers, and I quote directly, 'will be subjected to a rigorous in-school alignment process to ensure fairness'.

What does that mean? Read it again and see if you can decipher those 13 words that sound like they say so much but say absolutely nothing. Are they to grade on a curve? Who knows.

This is another gem. And again I quote.

“A special unit is being established within the Department of Education and Skills to process the data provided by each school and operate national standardisation, again to ensure fairness amongst all students.”

So we have 'a school alignment' and 'national standardisation'. Sounds wonderful but it amounts to absolutely nothing. I won't even give credibility to the so called 'appeals process' by outlining it here.

If Joe was being honest, he could have said it all in one line.

“We are washing our hands of this and placing all the pressure on teachers to come up with a grade and we are using the principal to sign off on the grade as a safety net for us.”

That is a huge amount of pressure to place on the educators in our system. They effectively now hold the futures of their students in their hands simply because the government bottled it. Can you imagine that responsibility and that level of stress after teaching the same students over the last six years?

Some teachers will be straight down the line and objective. Ideally, that's how they will all approach it but that will not be the case. Human nature just does not allow for that.

Some will let emotion come into the equation and that's to be expected. Many of our teachers are not far removed from the Leaving Cert themselves and are now being asked to stand in judgement on students not much their junior.

And it might not happen, you truly hope it will not happen, but this bodge job opens up the door for teachers to be influenced or even threatened, in the grades they give.

And after the grades are out, the teachers will not be off the hook.

You can already picture the scene. The reaction of the irate parents of Johnny or Mary who don't think their little darlings got the grade they thought they deserved from the teacher. There won't be much social distancing when that knock comes on the teacher's door! And Liveline will feast on the reactions for a month.

Or if a teacher has more children from one family to come through the school. They now have four or five more years of facing parents at parent-teacher meetings who think, probably wrongly, that the teacher did wrong by their other child. That sounds like great fun.

Or worse still, could individual teachers face legal action based on the grades they give that may cause 'pain and suffering' for students who miss out on their preferred college place? 

Teachers are part of our communities and putting the pressure on them to come up with grades is unfair and amounts to a glorified passing of the buck by the people who are meant to be running the country.

Holding the exams would at least have meant the playing field would have been somewhat level. Yes, it would have been harder on all the students and some would have adapted better than others. But that's just the way of the world.

In a way, it would have been as much a test of their ability to adjust and their ability to handle pressure as much as their ability to learn by rote. In many ways, it would have been a more complete examination of the individual. A much better preparation for the world beyond the closed school gates.

Joe says in his press release that 'the decision has to be taken now to remove the anxiety that many students have been experiencing over how the exams would look'.

He could have removed it by simply ensuring the exams took place within the public health guidelines. Instead, the government hid the hooks and crooks that we all thought Leo was going to use and bowed to pressure.

Which begs an even more important question. Where is the next pressure point? Where will pressure come to bear to get the government to change a decision? What will be the next u-turn?

Because the next capitulation to pressure could have much more far-reaching consequences for the country as a whole.