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THERE HAVE BEEN calls for reform of the Leaving Certificate and the way in which third level education is funded following the publication of exam results today.
The Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) has said that major reform is needed of the Leaving Cert examination system after the latest figures showed the trend of results in Maths and Science was little changed on recent years.
It was reported earlier that results in Maths and Science continued to show disappointing results with a high failure rate in Maths where 4,367 students failed across all levels, including the 10 per cent of students who failed ordinary level maths.
Nearly 58,000 students have been finding out their results across the country today.
There were failure rates of 9 per cent for chemistry, 8 per cent for physics and 8 per cent for biology, according to figures from the State Examinations Commission.
Responding, IBEC said that reform of the Maths curriculum must continue. The Project Maths subject was trialled for a second year in 25 secondar schools and from next year will offer 25 bonus points to anyone who takes the subject with the hope that there will be more engagement.
IBEC head of education poliocy Tony Donohue said fluency in Maths was vital:
Less than 16 per cent of the 51,991 students that sat leaving certificate maths took the higher level paper. This is down from a high of 18.9 per cent in 2005 and is significantly out of line with other subjects.By not sitting the honours paper, most students have automatically excluded themselves from many science, engineering and technology third-level courses
The Leaving Certificate can be a catalyst for a fulfilled and rewarding life, but only if it has created a desire for further learning. Unfortunately the current system is over-reliant on rote learning and may be having the opposite effect for a significant number of students.
Calls for reform were echoed by the Unions of Students in Ireland (USI) which said that the Leaving Cert was “in dire need of a major overhaul”.
USI president Gary Redmond said:
For the past number of months, these students have been under an enormous amount of unnecessary pressure, studying intensely for an exam system that needs to be re-evaluated.A new Leaving Certificate system of continuous assessment should be introduced for a fairer assessment of the performance of secondary school students over a longer period of time.
The high failure rate in the subjects of science and math in this year’s Leaving Certificate also needs to be examined, and the question of why only 50 per cent of teachers are qualified to teach maths, needs to be looked at.
Meanwhile Chambers Ireland, the country’s largest business network, has said that the Leaving Cert results should be seen as a gateway to “lifelong learning”.
It called on the Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn to introduce a loan scheme for students to pay for third level education, something the Minister ruled out earlier this week.
Ian Talbot, CEO of Chambers Ireland, added:
Regardless of their satisfaction with today’s results, all students should see the Leaving Certificate not as the finishing line, but as a gateway to lifelong learning.Ireland’s economy is changing rapidly and, in order to keep pace, re-skilling and up-skilling has become increasingly important.
Poll: Do you think the Leaving Cert results are important? >
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They say the same thing every year year and nothing ever comes of it but yeah, it does need a major overhaul.
Aw no, I said ‘year’ twice… I look like a right eejit :(
Can’t take you anywhere
I’m embarrassed for you!!!!! ;)
We are preparing the children of today for jobs that may not exist in 4 years! The LC need’s to be a continious rolling schooling plan that changes small things every few years to keep up with the world of tomorrow and teachers have to be able to be fired! Some of them are crap and they can just re locate and get a new job dragging down students!
“the question of why only 50 per cent of teachers are qualified to teach maths, needs to be looked at.”
I would question where USI president Gary Redmond is getting his info from here. Considering secondary level teachers are only qualified to teach subjects related to their own primary degree, 50% of teachers qualified to teach maths seems like an extraordinary amount.
No everyone is capable of getting an A in Maths or the Sciences, in fact not everyone is capable of passing these subjects. Some people are good at it, some are not. That’s just the way people are made.
Any changes to curriculum and to marking needs to take account of grade inflation (we’ve seen serious issues with this at third level already). There’s no use a student getting a good mark in a science exam only to find that what’s been taught is not up to standard when they get to Third level.
Changing the LC may be necessary, but it certainly is not sufficient to attract more students to science & math subjects. Science should be taught at primary school level, hopefully with the result that more children will find it interesting & enjoyable. In addition, the science subjects should be made more practical. The JC science curriculum is in my view very poor, relying on rote learning & not enough lab/field work. It should not be dumbed down, but it could & should be made more attractive.
What’s rote learning?
Séamus, rote learning is when you are memorizing something word for word, e.g. memorizing whole paragraphs of a text book. There’s no use of imagination or engaging of the student’s interest in the actual subject that way and it’s a shame so much of Irish education goes like that. I remember for Junior Cert., I was testing my friend on these Irish letters we had to memorize, and until I suggested it it had never occurred to her to think about what each phrase meant in English and then say them in Irish. She was just doing as the teacher said, and trying to memorize the words themselves without using her understanding of the language, which was actually fairly good.
Rote learning is when you learn things off by heart! :) which doesnt really allow for independent thinking!
I agree a major overhaul of the leaving certificate is required, but why leave it just at the leaving cert? The entire Irish education system needs to be re evaluated in the face of an ever changing world, the "three r’s" genre of teaching is no longer and can simply no longer be, the be all and end all. Many of my friends in school were wonderful artists, musicians, cooks, etc etc and it seems that the irish education system is severely lacking in many many places, not only in maths and science, when it comes to harnessing some of these talents.
Learning off a factor theorem by heart or learning off why hamlet hadn’t the gall to kill claudius, this process of rehearsal and recital for exam day, it is simply a bland and uninteresting process. Most of the information learned is largely irrelevant and unnecessary to a teenager, even to many adults. We need to start listening to our children, not acting on what we think is best on their behalf
The take up of honours maths in Ireland, at 17%, is actually quite high compared to EU countries where Maths isn’t compulsary and students opt for a particular stream, the majority opting for humanities.
@Cillian- I think Redmond is referring to the fact that only 50% of maths teachers have a relevant maths qualification. This is a huge problem in secondary schools at the moment. But on the other hand one of the best maths grinds tutors I know is not a maths (or any kind of) teacher and just has a natural aptitude for the subject, it can happen.
@John Forrest, science is taught in primary schools and has been since the curriculum changed in 1999.
It’s taught practically with lots of experiments and hands on activities. Its taught from junior infants to 6th class. It’s when these kids start secondary school that the active learning is replaced with a "take out your books and write this down" attitude. Ridiculous.
There needs to be more coherence between primary and secondary school curriculum. The gap at the moment is crazy. Primary teaching in Ireland is generally very progressive whilst second levels methodologies still seem to be stuck in the dark ages.
What they need is awesome young teachers like me to teach these kids some physics and chemistry. But sadly they won’t give me a job here, so I’ll just go over to England and serve with my skills over there. Then maybe Australia or Canada. Hopefully this pensions amendment will loosen up a bit of the Educational constipation next year.
I think a student loan system would be fairest. Free third level education has not produced any signifcant increase in poorer students going on to college, however good their leaving cert results were. The money needs to be spent on primary and secondary education to pull up the marks in maths. When I was in school many moons ago x and y were only in the alphabet as far as I was concerned. And yet, when I went back to school and took the leaving cert in 1999 I got D+ in maths after only studying for 2 years. This is because the teacher had only minimal students and could make it interesting to us.
The % taking higher level maths and science subjects seems to have remained fairly static for years. Don’t understand IBEC’s position. Can’t reverse an ability trend overnight without playing around with standards. It is a little like insisting that the number of red-haired people must increase promptly.
dont reform it, scrap it
Scrap schooling?
have your say