Teaching Matters: The public and media reaction to Enda Kenny's election as leader of Fine Gael was, to put it mildly, underwhelming. However, due to a work ethic that would leave Mary O'Rourke's friends in the shade, he has achieved far more than was originally expected of him.
Given that he has brought Fine Gael to a situation where for the first time in years they look to have a chance of being part of the next government, it was with some alarm that I read his recent pronouncements on education in this newspaper. They are scarily reminiscent of failed policies in the UK. Take the idea of publishing an annual school report, to be updated every year. Policies on discipline, special needs and bullying would be included, along with "extra-curricular achievements and activities" and "full information regarding facilities, subjects and exam performance".
All this is fine and dandy, but problems arise immediately. Given the challenges facing schools and teachers, allocating hours and hours of time to compiling annual school reports seems desperately wasteful. Time devoted to the report would have to be taken from other more pressing needs, such as adjusting to the vastly increased intake of children without fluent English. More importantly, proliferation of paper in schools is no guarantee that anything real is behind the piles of pages.
UK writer Stephen Ball described the dangers of "perfomativity" defined once as "schools filled with development plans, policies, curriculum plans, literacy strategies and inspection reports - a paper trail of change without any real substance".
There are already some 80 different policies that schools are expected to produce, with no templates from which to work. There is also the danger that no matter how balanced the information provided, many parents will immediately look at examination results, and base their judgments of the school on that. The suggestion that schools in desperate need of new buildings or extensions would include criticisms of the Department of Education (DES) in annual school reports, given that the same schools are probably in delicate negotiations with said department, is simply naïve.
Fine Gael is also proposing that every pupil be assessed before entering secondary school, in order to see what kind of progress has been made by Leaving Certificate. This is exactly the kind of "value-added" model that has been destructive in the UK. Human beings are not amenable to such simplistic analysis. Take a child who comes in with good results in her initial assessment. In the course of her school career, she contracts glandular fever, and is lethargic and unable to function well for nearly a year. Just when she has recovered, her parents announce that they are splitting up, because Dad's girlfriend is expecting a baby. This is far from an outlandish scenario. How are you supposed to capture all of that in a "before and after" snapshot? Also, these proposals reduce education even more to a "points" system, by implying that all that matters in education are grades on a page. Schools are not factories, who take in a "product" in first year, and spit it off the end of an assembly line in sixth year with neatly measurable improvements. They are communities, and when they function at their best, much of what they do can never be measured.
Most disappointing of all, perhaps, are Enda Kenny's proposals to make the Irish language optional after the Junior Cert. His own fluency in Irish is commendable. He is also right that the teaching of the language needs reform. However, making Irish optional, while a crowd-pleaser, does not constitute reform, but a death-blow. One would think he was in power already, given that his proposal is cheap, while what is really needed would demand resources.
There are a number of factors militating against success at the moment. A significant number of students choosing primary teaching as a career may have found Irish difficult at second-level. They struggle to achieve the standard needed to obtain a teaching degree, but have no ongoing help to maintain standards once qualified. As teachers, they are not part of a living community of Irish-speakers, and often only use it while teaching Irish themselves. Ongoing free language immersion courses are needed, with substitution in place for teachers taking them. There is also no co-ordination between primary and second-level, and many pupils find the jump in standards dizzying.
Some of Enda Kenny's more recent proposals have merit, such as placing the emphasis on the spoken language. Immersion experiences for students are also desperately needed. The Leaving Cert Applied emphasises fluency in everyday ways such as ordering a meal in a restaurant or buying something in a shop. This model could be adapted for the traditional Leaving Cert. It is also an excellent suggestion to award half the marks in the Leaving Cert for the oral examination. However, making the subject optional would undermine the value of many of these ideas.
Newcomers to Ireland from Asia and from Eastern Europe are enthusiastically learning Irish, the Gaeilscoileanna are thriving. Why should we concede defeat at second-level before even attempting any of the proposed reforms? The loss of a language has been compared to the loss of the Louvre. It is disappointing to see a major opposition party opting for populism when it is vision that is required.
Breda O'Brien is a teacher at Dominican College, Muckross Park, Dublin
