Dr. Anne Looney:

Given the breadth of scope of the work of the committee, I will confine my remarks to the issue of the leaving certificate examination and the assessment options in that context. There is little contestation in respect of assessment practice in senior cycle. Building on the experience of junior cycle, most teachers in senior cycle use a wide variety of assessment methods and give good feedback to students. Students get a chance to work in groups and they provide feedback to each other on these collaborative tasks. All of these practices are underpinned by strong research evidence.

However, the closer a student gets to the end of senior cycle and the leaving certificate examination, the more likely it is that this rich, rewarding and evidence-based assessment gets displaced by practice for examinations, completion of pieces of coursework and extensive revision with a view to recall under time constraints. The research on this kind of assessment is less compelling. Although summative tests with stakes can act as a motivator for some groups of students, most students - and most adults - find them stressful to some degree, with some students being more negatively impacted than others. In fact, the completion of public examinations such as the leaving certificate run counter to most of the research we know in respect of assessment that supports student learning.

Why is this the case? It is because public examinations, including the leaving certificate, are less artefacts of assessment and more artefacts of culture. Examinations persist because they are social rather than assessment processes. We still have the leaving certificate not because it reflects best practice in assessment, but because it is culturally embedded. Despite an annual liturgy of hand-wringing and head-wagging about inequalities in class and gender, concerns for student well-being and pernicious impact on the kind of learning and lives we want for young people, it persists because it has become part of Irish social and cultural life. For this reason, at the end of the annual liturgy of hand-wringing, the procession of critics, including me, moves back into the sanctuary of the academy or commentariat and concludes that, in the end, sure what else would we do, and sure look at the mess they have made everywhere else, and let us go in peace and do it all again next year.

The Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, uses the phrase "social imaginary" to describe how people imagine their social existence. He says that social imaginaries exist in the minds of ordinary people - in images, stories, legends and mythologies. Ireland has a very particular imaginary of public education. Despite many current debates about the value of vocational knowledge and skills, our imaginary places greater emphasis on theoretical knowledge, one of the consequences of developing an exam system based on paper and pencil tests. Another defining feature of our imaginary is a conviction that participation in tertiary education is a measure of personal, familial and system success. An often unspoken of feature is that, ultimately, the leaving certificate does a reasonable job of sorting people into those who have earned and deserve success and those who have not earned it or do not deserve it, a view that is often summed up in one of my favourite phrases: "It may be brutal, but it is fair".

I will move to the end of my statement in deference to the time constraints. I am something of a veteran of leaving certificate reform. I have been the proponent of the slow and steady change. I led the introduction of coursework and helped design a revised system of grades and points and yet here we are again, on the same themes, identifying the same challenges, ready to embark on a series of changes that will be the result of extensive consultation and probably have broad support, although I expect that students may be more vocal critics than heretofore. We will design an assessment system that will have a balance between validity, reliability and manageability and that will settle on a series of bearable trade-offs listed in my written submission.

UNESCO recently published the report of the International Commission on the Futures of Education. The report pulls few punches on the crises now faced by the human race and the planet, of which the ongoing pandemic is just the smallest. The report proposes a new social contract – a new imaginary - that will deliver on the promise of quality education for all. One of the most interesting propositions is that, in the future, education is going to have to concern itself not just with learning, but with unlearning. Looking to the future, the report suggests education will need to support us in our need to unlearn human exceptionalism and possessive individualism. If we were to make a similar proposition for education in Ireland, particularly in senior cycle as we consider the leaving certificate, what might we want to unlearn? What behaviours and attitudes does our current examination teach that may be contributing to the crises we now face and stopping our ability to solve them? There is hyper-competitiveness, possessive individualism and compliance at the expense of creativity. We could think of others. According to UNESCO, the new social contract will be built on pedagogies that learn in and with the world, founded on collaboration, co-operation and solidarity. What might a new educational imaginary for Ireland be founded on?

Given where we find ourselves, before we move on to the next edition of the leaving certificate that will further embed our current educational imaginary, should we give time to considering whether this imaginary is the one we want and need to get us through what are going to be the most challenging decades in human history? Addressing this question and at least putting our current educational imaginary itself through some form of examination, whether through the Citizens' Assembly on education as proposed by the current Government or through another deliberative process, has never been more urgent for us. If we do not at least question the current educational imaginary, then we are confirming for generations past and to come that it really is all about the points.