Fermanagh students could benefit from Department's plans for qualifications

Well, good luck to her, as the system at present is anything but clear, but by throwing money at it – approximately £2 million shared between post-primary schools – she perhaps hopes the problems that blighted the Covid-19 years will finally be in the rear view mirror.

With 192 secondary school, 14 independent colleges and 39 special schools, that’s shy of £10,000 per school – that’ll go a long way...

So what are the problems with qualifications at the moment and why are CCEA being singled out?

To put it simply, CCEA – the cumbersomely worded ‘Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment’ – basically run the show in Northern Ireland.

They keep under review all aspects of the NI curriculum, examinations and assessments and undertake statutory roles in relation to the province’s education system.

Furthermore, they advise the DoE (Department of Education) on matters relating to the curriculum, assessment, examinations, external qualifications and most crucially, they approve qualifications.

All this is done in line with other bodies carrying out similar roles in Great Britain, and this authority comes with the legal weight of the Education (NI) Order 1998, ringing in its bureaucratic ears.

With such a mighty remit, they are the ones that need to get it right, and recently, they’ve been hugely criticised for getting it wrong with talk of being out of touch with teachers and schools – who’d have thought a non-departmental public or ‘arm’s-length’ body could be out of touch? Perish the thought!

So what are these problems? No disrespect, but trying to put them in an easy to digest form of words is like trying to explain Scientology to evangelical extremists – it’s a problem of logic versus belief, with the backdrop of institutional arrogance.

We have to start somewhere, so let’s go back to before Covid-19, the new ‘BC’.

In this golden era, students and teachers were merrily trundling along with their life, entering for GCSEs, AS and A-Levels and hosts of other qualifications, such as BTECs, IBs and other increasingly spurious bits of papers with authoritative-sounding qualifications.

The new kid on the block, linear assessments, had just arrived with some schools and subjects left in genuine limbo, such as those doing Welsh Board A-Levels, but in hindsight, these seemed small compared to what was about to come.

For those outside education, linear assessments are those where all assessments are taken at the end of the course, completely opposite to the then popular modular system that was slowly starting to lose its bragging rights in staff rooms up and down the country.

There are arguments for and against, but that’s for another day.

Then along came a visit from Mr. Covid, and suddenly the world of education (and everything else in life) was turned on its head.

Schools grappled hard with the crisis, but as is well documented, we were left with a system that pretty much brought down the career of Peter Weir, where in the first two years of the pandemic, teachers, parents and students were all in a state of apoplexy and, to be frank, a lottery of exam grades followed.

Admittedly, it did get a bit better last year but still, there were gaping holes in exam assessment practices so large, you could have driven lorry loads of BTEC coursework through them.

That’s the bird’s-eye view, and a very high bird at that. There’s lots of other minutiae that at some point needs, and deserves, more reflection from people in my position, but for now, let’s flick the pages back to Minister for Education Mrs. McIlveen’s statement of support.

As with all such politicians’ statements, ‘me’ and ‘I’ feature a lot, but that goes with the territory – until they get it wrong of course, and then it’s ‘our’ and ‘us’.

This announced ‘Qualification of Support Programme’ then is allegedly going to “give reassurance to our young people, their families, teachers and school leaders in advance of the new academic year”, going on to say that “fairness to pupils is [her] priority and arrangements for next year’s qualifications acknowledge the unprecedented disruption ... our education system has faced and [this support] aims to support recovery”.

So, in what way will this support come? Basically, students in NI will now follow the practice of Scotland and Wales, in that students here will know more precisely what they will be tested on before they sit their exams.

This is a kind of progression from the unit omission system that is in place for the current suite of examinations.

What this means is that, at present, students are being tested on fewer topics, and the criticism of this is that it is not in the best interests of students to continue like this, according to Mrs. McIlveen.

Instead, the focus for 2023 is going to be on covering all of the topics, but telling the students in advance which specific areas they’re going to be tested on.

When exactly the schools will be told this vital information is the critical point, but these details are not available yet.

From a teaching point of view, schools are being told in the twilight of this term to prepare for teaching all the syllabi when their time budgets have been drawn up until August of this year.

In other words, all the teachers’ time has now been accounted for, so where will they find the time to resuscitate topics and prepare teaching materials that lay in abeyance during Covid-19?

Will this be what schools spend their ten grand on, or will they use it differently to run extra classes?

Well, it seems they can do what they want with it – to quote the Minister (if there was an Assembly): “Schools will have the freedom to deploy this funding flexibly, in a way that best supports their pupils preparing for exams in 2023.”

Is this a clear plan? Make your own mind up.