Professor Michael O'Leary:

The Deputy raises the fundamental question regarding how to bring about change. I offer this as something to think about. In 2017 there was the presentation of a notion that teachers are vehemently against being involved in the certification of their own students. That idea was in the ether and we saw placards that spoke about fairness and so on. People in newspaper articles argue that teachers abhor the notion of being involved.

I want to counter that by giving the committee some data from a piece of research we did in DCU. We asked an agreement question based around "strongly agree" and so on. It asked: "As a result of having been involved in the calculated grades process in 2020, in my school I feel more positively disposed to being involved directly in assessing my students for certification purposes." Of those surveyed, 30% of teachers agreed with that statement. I do not believe those voices have been heard. I do not hear them but they are there some place.

While I must add the caveat that this was a relatively small study of some 750 voluntary samples, there was a group of teachers who agreed with that statement. Of the remainder, 62% of teachers disagreed with the statement and 9% were undecided. If we add the undecided 9% to the 30% who agreed with the statement, we have a 60:40 split. That 60:40 split was also the evident in the responses to the statement: "I believe that teachers' involvement in assessment for certification purposes would lead to fairer outcomes for the students in my school." Perhaps the Deputy is referring to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Of the respondents, 36% agreed with that statement, 48% disagreed and 16% were undecided.

I just want to put those findings out there to show that it is not all negative. We will, I hope, do a follow-up study on the accredited grades. We want to check on those data because it was a surprise to me to find that one in three teachers were saying that this had changed their minds about being involved in certifying their own students. I do not believe any teacher wants to be solely involved in that process - that is not what they are saying - but something certainly happened in 2020 and again in 2021.