Heads or tails: the relationship between curriculum and assessment in Irish post-primary education

ABSTRACT

Assessment is often described as the tail that wags the curriculum dog. Curriculum has featured more prominently than assessment in Irish scholarship. Drawing on relevant policy documents and interviews with senior National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) and State Examinations Commission (SEC) officers, and relevant documentation, the author attempts to redress this imbalance. The Irish curriculum/ assessment relationship was characterised by strict Department of Education control for some sixty years. The education partners became involved during the 1980s, culminating in the establishment of the statutory NCCA in 2002. Meanwhile, the Department of Education’s Examinations Branch was replaced by the statutory SEC. Issues arising from these developments and from the changing external environment are considered, including: increased NCCA/SEC collaboration; the evolution of curriculum culture including the shift from subject syllabuses (focused on subject content), to curriculum specifications (focusing on learning outcomes); assessment criteria; content and performance standards; marking schemes and assessment grids; pre-ordained grade boundaries and the use of attainment referencing to maintain standards from year to year. The discussion considers the pros and cons of learning outcomes, the impact of high-stakes examinations on student learning, and the role of the teacher as professional in the assessment of students for national certification.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• assessment
• coherence
• Leaving Certificate examinations

Introduction

The widely recognised influence of assessment for certification on curriculum practice has been variously characterised in terms of ‘the tail that wags the curriculum dog’ (Hargreaves and Earl 1990; Hargreaves 1989). Since assessment ‘operationalizes our goals as much as it reflects them’ (Hargreaves and Earl 1990, 210), the pursuit of broad-ranging educational outcomes and achievements requires an equally broad assessment policy (Leithwood, Lawton, and Hargreaves 1988). The ‘backwash effect’ (Broadfoot 1979; Torrance 2011) of assessment means that, where curriculum and assessment reforms are not undertaken ‘with planned coherence … assessment reform will simply shape the curriculum by default’ (Hargreaves and Earl 1990, 135).

Whereas Irish curriculum policy and practice have been subjected to considerable analysis over the years, relatively little attention has been devoted to assessment and the state examinations. Drawing on State Examinations Commission (SEC) documentation, and interviews with senior National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) and SEC officers, the author attempts to redress this imbalance by considering the curriculum/assessment relationship from the perspective of post-primary schooling. Having briefly introduced some relevant context, he traces the evolution of this relationship over the past century. While the special ‘emergency arrangements’ that were put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic may influence future developments, they are not the focus of the current paper.

Some general context

As Catherine Cornbleth (1990, 6) has so persuasively argued, ‘curriculum is contextually shaped’. For example, the adoption of Tylerian scientific management resulted in fragmentation, technicism, and a monolith of compartmentalised subjects that is characterised by subcultures and specialisms (Goodson 1997). In the context of such bureaucratised and fragmented conceptions of curriculum, progressive dreams of education for democratisation and for psychosocial as well as intellectual development have often been marginalised (Pinar 2004). The resulting environment, which encourages short-term and compromise solutions, is indicative of what Carr and Kemmis (1986)¹ call a technical rather than an emancipatory paradigm, one where education is treated in isolation from ‘its cultural and socio-cultural contexts … [one where] curriculum, as document, is apolitical and value-free [and where] curriculum as product [is] arbitrarily separated from curriculum policy-making and use’ (Cornbleth 1990, 17).

The introduction of International Educational Indicators (INES), which has played a significant role in making the OECD the global education policy actor it is today, has served to legitimise

….a global ideology of hyper-quantification in education governance [and] this new corporate managerialist approach to public sector administration [with its] raft of performance indicators [represents] quintessential technocracy during an era when trust in judgement and tradition were radically diminishing in favour of … evidence-based policy [and where] educational problems and traditions quickly became technical issues in search of solutions [and] an output-based education would feed into human capital theory (Grek and Ydesen 2021, 134).

This mentality is evident, for example, in the influence of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and in the comparative studies conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The underlying mindset of technical rationality facilitates external control and ‘an engineering mentality’ (Cornbleth 1990, 21). This mentality contributes to teacher deskilling insofar as it fosters ‘reliance on experts and expert knowledge’ and assumes that teachers are ‘largely incapable of curriculum planning or enactment’. The associated environment is characterised by a ‘division of labour between the curriculum designers and the curriculum implementers’ (Grundy 1987, 32), resulting in schooling systems marked by ‘discontinuity … bureaucratisation and standardisation’ (Cornbleth 1990, 29).

Indicative of this growing technicism, the name of the Irish Education Ministry has changed three times over the last thirty years – from Department of Education to Department of Education and Science (DES), to Department of Education and Skills (DES). In an environment where the curriculum is seen in terms of document (OECD 1991; Gleeson 2021), education policy is increasingly concerned with human capital production and globalisation influences (Gleeson, Klenowski, and Looney 2020). Meanwhile our traditional Anglo-Saxon/American curriculum culture is morphing into a hybrid culture (Gleeson 2021), with an increasing emphasis on skills and learning outcomes as against teaching of content knowledge.

The Irish examination system however represents a classic example of that most common and conservative system, nationalised governance (Opposs et al. 2020)², whose continued popularity is particularly interesting at a time when privatisation of educational services is rampant (Ball 1994). Notwithstanding increasingly high student retention rates, Irish assessment and examination systems have remained largely unchanged³ in an environment where entry to higher education is determined by Leaving Certificate⁴ performance. Meanwhile, it is too early to gauge the impact of two recent developments – the replacement of the Junior Certificate examinations with a combination of Classroom-Based Assessments, written Assessment Tasks and state-certified examinations (DES 2015); the use of predicted Leaving Certificate grades during COVID-19 (Darmody, Lysaght, and O’Leary 2020).

Against that backdrop, let’s consider more closely the curriculum/assessment relationship at post-primary level.

The curriculum/assessment relationship prior to the 1998 Education Act

This section deals with the period from Irish Independence to the establishment of the Interim Curriculum and Examinations Board (CEB) and the NCCA.

The first sixty years of independence

The Leaving Certificate (LC) examinations date back to 1879.⁵ Concerns regarding the curriculum/assessment relationship were expressed by the Intermediate Education Commission as early as 1889 when it stipulated that ‘the papers set in the examination should be of such a character as to test true educational work, as distinct from the mere overloading of the memory’ (cited in Council of Education 1960, 50).

Post-Independence, the educational policies and practices of the ‘neighbouring colonial power’ (Coolahan 1981, 52) were adapted by the newly created Irish state. For example, the payment of teachers by examination results was discontinued. In an apparent attempt to promote ‘freedom of treatment’, LC course outlines⁶ no longer included ‘specific texts [and] course content was left to the discretion of the teacher’ (Coolahan 1986, 44). Prescribed texts were re-introduced however, following Taoiseach Éamon de Valera’s declaration in 1937 that the secondary school programme was ‘too narrow and too vague’. Department of Education Inspectors had complete control of secondary curriculum for the first sixty years of independence, while the Department’s Examinations Branch was responsible for the public examinations.

The Commission on the Intermediate Certificate Examination⁷ (I.C.E.) would observe that these examinations provided ‘a way of controlling the flow – or trickle – of public money to schools, and an attempt to improve the quality of teaching [at a time when there was] no recognised training or qualification or register for secondary teachers’ (Government of Ireland 1975, 55). In this environment the role of the teacher was to ‘deliver the curriculum [and] to lecture … [and they] were criticised for getting pupils to talk too much in class [while Inspectors] turned out examination papers like Smarties’ (Gleeson 2010, 305).

When syllabus committees⁸ came into being in 1965, they were chaired and controlled by members of the Inspectorate who ‘were primarily concerned with empire building and coverage of subject content … all stayed in their subject boxes’ (94). This resonates with the conclusion of Madaus and McNamara (1970, 15) whose study of the validity of the LC examination found that ‘one of the principal causes for the emphasis on Knowledge (sic) … was the syllabus, which for each subject was stated almost exclusively in terms of the content to be covered’.

Following the raising of the school leaving age in 1967, Minister Pádraig Faulkner established the I.C.E. Committee with a remit ‘to evaluate the present form and function of the Intermediate Certificate and to advise on new types of public examination’ (Government of Ireland 1975). Showing remarkable prescience, this Committee made a number of radical recommendations. These included the decentralisation of assessment, the establishment of an independent Leaving Certificate Examinations Board, the introduction of school-based assessment, supported by external moderation and nationally normed objective tests, and the introduction of a new administrative structure⁹ for junior cycle curriculum and assessment.¹⁰

Believing that assessment should be concerned with mastery of skills and knowledge rather than comparative ranking of students, the Committee (52) argued that dependency on norm-referenced assessment made it ‘hard … to deduce the precise levels of the student’s skills and knowledge’ and that the mastery of basic skills ‘should not be distributed in a ‘normal curve’. While acknowledging the need for some form of external measure, the Committee (v-vi) concluded that assessment needs to be ‘more varied in its modes’, ‘wider in its scope’, ‘broader in its objects’, ‘frequent’, ‘school-based’, ‘flexible’, and that it should ‘involve the teachers concerned’ and facilitate ‘various forms of curriculum development and innovation’.

The ensuing Public Examinations Evaluation Project (PEEP) (Heywood, McGuinness, and Murphy 1980) concluded that, ‘subject to suitable provision for in-service training and adequate statistical back-up from research and statistical services’, the I.C.E. Committee’s proposal for the introduction of school-based assessment was feasible. As McGuinness (1991, 175) would subsequently observe, while ‘the I.C.E. report was highly relevant … the biggest problem was actually getting someone to accept it’. The harsh reality however is that junior cycle curriculum remained unchanged for some twenty years after the raising of the school-leaving age (Gleeson 2018), while such changes as have been made to LC assessment arrangements have been gradual and piecemeal.

The Examinations Branch was originally located on the same Dublin campus as the Department of Education. When, in response to growing student participation rates, the Branch moved to Athlone in 1978, Department Inspectors continued to have responsibility for subject syllabuses and the setting of examination papers. Along with their control function, external examinations, came to play an increasingly important role in selection for entry to future careers (O’Sullivan 2005). This was reflected, for example, in the reminiscences of former Assistant Secretary Seán Ó Mathúna, who recalled that, having spent his entire professional life in the Department, one of his greatest achievements was to ensure the holding of the 1979 state exams when the Post Offices were on strike and there was a shortage of petrol, because ‘fifty or sixty thousand students’ careers depended on the exams being held’ (Gleeson 2010, 143).

Interim Curriculum and Examinations Board and non-statutory NCCA

The establishment of an independent Examinations Board had been proposed in the I.C.E. Committee report, the Draft Education Bill of 1976, and by Minister John Boland¹¹ in his 1981 Seanad speech. The perceived advantage was that this would free up the post-primary Inspectorate to monitor teaching standards and provide support for teachers. A Departmental Working Party established by Minister for Education, Gemma Hussey, highlighted the importance of coherence between curriculum and assessment and suggested that the establishment of a body responsible for examinations only would confer on assessment ‘a separate existence, influencing the process from the outside [and making] examination syllabuses the main determinant of methodology (Department of Education 1983, 5–6).

The Interim Curriculum and Examinations Board (CEB) was established on a representational basis in 1983 (Gleeson 2010), with two of its 22 members being nominated by the Department of Education, one of whom represented the Examinations Branch. The main focus of the Board’s sixteen terms of reference was on post-primary curriculum matters. Its first consultative document¹² noted that the work of the PEEP project ‘is of interest in any consideration of examination reform’ (CEB 1984, 26). It called for a unified assessment system at junior cycle that 'should permit the involvement of teachers as part of their professional work’ (7), for the assessment of a broader range of skills and qualities, and for greater flexibility that would facilitate the development of recognised alternative programmes. With regard to the existing examinations system, three major issues were identified:

• From a democratic perspective, the need to grant greater autonomy to schools and teachers.

• From an egalitarian perspective, the need to respond to the needs of a rapidly growing school-going population.

• ‘Our present system of public examinations with its heavy emphasis on liberal classical academic subjects … cannot provide an adequate educational goal for all students’ (26).

The critical approach adopted by the CEB was in sharp contrast to Ireland’s first Education White Paper (Department of Education 1980, 43) where curriculum was seen in narrow terms as ‘the range of subjects, with their individual syllabi, that are approved for study at a particular level’. One of the Board’s three main committees had responsibility for Assessment and Certification – testimony to the perceived importance of the curriculum/assessment relationship – and its final report called for research into modes of assessment and examination procedures, and recommended that ‘the techniques of assessment should be appropriate to the objectives and content of a course [and that] part of the assessment for public examinations should be school-based’ (CEB 1986, 38).

When the non-statutory NCCA replaced the Interim CEB in 1987, its terms of reference included three main areas for review: curriculum aims, objectives, structure and scope; syllabus and course content; pupil assessment. The Examinations Branch was not, however, represented on the new Council. Relationships between the NCCA and the Department were heavily dependent on the attitudes of the Minister of the day. Gary Granville, then Deputy CEO of the NCCA, would describe these early days as the ‘glory days [when] we were reporting directly to the Minister … operating as the Department... not only in formulating curriculum policy but in interpreting and laying down the rules. We even got queries from the Examinations Branch!’ (Gleeson 2010, 289).

However, when Mary O’Rourke’s tenure as Minister ended in 1991, the NCCA entered what Granville called a ‘period in the doldrums’, where her successor, Seamus Brennan, TD, ‘would have been only marginally aware of the existence of the NCCA’ (290). Indeed, Gary couldn’t recall ‘any direct consultations with NCCA Executive prior to the publication of the Education Green Paper’. For the remainder of the nineties the NCCA’s role was largely confined to the preparation of syllabus documents, in an environment where ‘the Department strategy was to seamlessly bring the NCCA right back into the centre of the Department … the attitude was one of, send over the documents and we’ll take it from there … you’ve done your work. Thanks very much and we really appreciate it’.

Along similar lines, Albert Ó Ceallaigh, CEO of NCCA (1987–2001)¹³, postulated the existence of a ‘bamboo curtain’ between the Council and the Department, while Council Chair, Dr Ed Walsh, would recall that ‘the exams machine tended to march in its own strange direction, regardless of curriculum policy changes’ (291). On the other hand, from his perspective as Department Chief Inspector, Sean Glennane, regarded the NCCA as ‘an advisory ad hoc group that produces syllabus documents [whereas] the Department has responsibility for policy’.¹⁴ Granville would recall, however, that when it came to policy implementation, the NCCA was invariably ‘called on by the Department and expected to perform in a circus that we hadn’t designed ourselves or didn’t have responsibility for, knowing that, from the schools’ perspective, the NCCA and the Department were indistinguishable’ (290).

The new Council immediately became engrossed in ‘fixing the parts’ (Hord 1995), working frantically on the development of Junior Certificate subject syllabus documents. The existing assessment arrangements would remain in situ due to the unwillingness of teacher trade union members to assess their own students for national certification. This led McGuinness (1991, 175) to remark that ‘we still persist in divorcing completely the devising of curriculum and assessment policy. It is far too late to ask when a curriculum has been designed: ‘How do we assess it? One thus ends up with overloaded courses, which lead to superficial teaching, superficial learning, and also to superficial examining’.¹⁵ Meanwhile, the OECD (1991, 73) Examiners would recommend that ‘a major reform of assessment, examining and credentialising is long overdue, [one that is] directed at the examination system, if curriculum reform strategies are to succeed’.¹⁶

The general consensus at the National Education Convention (NEC) of 1993 was that the objectives of the Junior Certificate programme would not be achieved unless assessment reforms were introduced (Coolahan 1994, 74), The ensuing Education White Paper (Department of Education 1995, 61) would repeat the now familiar call for ‘assessment procedures [that are] comprehensive enough to test the full range of abilities across the curriculum … [and] the full range of curricular objectives’. The Background Document prepared for the Points Commission (Government of Ireland 1998, 113) would again highlight ‘the lack of congruence between the aims and goals of the second-level curriculum and the modes and techniques of assessment used for the established Leaving Certificate’, along with the associated narrowing of the curriculum due to teaching to the examination.

This ‘ongoing mismatch between the [programme’s] aims and objectives [and its] assessment … dominated by terminal written examinations’ (DES 1999, 2) was highlighted yet again in the review of the Junior Certificate¹⁷, which stated that ‘the need for change has become urgent’ (12) because the failure of existing assessment arrangements to assess key skills was hindering curriculum breadth and balance and favouring expediency over quality. The DES (2002, 24) Strategy Statement would reiterate the call for a ‘review of assessment instruments and certification processes’, and the NCCA (2003, 23) senior cycle consultative document concluded that the education system fails to promote independent self-directed learning and ‘assesses a very narrow range of learning, mostly the ability to recall and write information, [while] rewarding product over process, [and putting] undue pressure on students to perform over a concentrated period of time’. Similar sentiments were also expressed during the public consultation process initiated by Minister Noel Dempsey, Your Education System (Kellaghan and McGee 2005, 22).

Clearly then, the dysfunctional nature of the curriculum/assessment relationship was becoming a matter of growing concern over the course of the twentieth century. So where is that relationship at today?

The current curriculum/assessment relationship

This section deals with the establishment of statutory curriculum and assessment bodies, changes in the approach to curriculum design, and the state examinations process.

Enter statutory curriculum and assessment bodies

While the original draft of the Education Act made no mention of the NCCA, ‘the annual teacher conferences at Easter 1997 saw strong criticism of the Bill, particularly at the ASTI Convention’ (Walshe 1999, 195). Following a change of government, Education Minister Micheál Martin responded positively to the representations of these key partners, with sections 38–48 (Part VII) of the amended Act (Government of Ireland 1998) making provision for a statutory NCCA. Reminiscent of the 1980 White Paper, the Act defines the curriculum for recognised schools in classic Anglo-Saxon/American terms: ‘the subjects to be offered in recognised schools [and] the syllabus for each subject’ (30.1a) The ‘object’ of the Council is to advise the Minister on curriculum matters¹⁸, and on ‘the assessment procedures employed in schools and examinations on subjects which are part of the curriculum’.¹⁹ The functions of the NCCA include curriculum review and advising the Minister on ‘the standards of knowledge and skills which students at various age levels should attain and the mechanisms for assessing the achievement of such standards, having regard to national and international standards’ (41,2d).

The section of the Education Act dealing with examinations states that ‘the Minister may make regulations for the effective conduct of examinations’ (50,1) and ‘appoint a person or a body of persons to advise him or her on any matter relating to the examinations’ (50,2). The SEC, which replaced the Examinations Branch, was established by statutory order in March 2003. It is a non-departmental body, under the aegis of the Department of Education and Skills, with responsibility for the operation of the State Certificate Examinations. Its website states that it is ‘committed to working in partnership with school authorities and education providers in order to deliver a high-quality examination and assessment system that is efficient, fair and accessible and to ensure that the system is operated in an environment of openness, transparency and accountability’.

Recent NCCA developments

Since being afforded statutory status, the influence of the NCCA, with its increased resources for consultation and research, has grown significantly. One notes, for example, their commissioning of a six-year longitudinal study of a cohort of post-primary students (Smyth 2016). There has been a shift away from an Anglo-Saxon/American curriculum culture and from traditional discourse around ‘the curriculum as document’ (Gleeson 2021). This evolution was particularly evident in the Framework for the Junior Cycle (DES 2015) and in a deepening realisation of the complexity of curriculum change where meanings are more important than management. Meanwhile, representational Course Committees, so dominant during the non-statutory Council’s development of Junior Certificate syllabuses, have been replaced with more broadly-based Development Groups and Course Boards. Subject syllabuses have been replaced by curriculum specifications in the Framework for Junior Cycle, with some ten Leaving Certificate subject syllabuses following the same path to date.

With regard to assessment, the original version of the junior cycle Framework (DES 2012, 6) had proposed the replacement of the existing Junior Certificate examination with a focus on ‘supporting learning’ through school-based, formative and summative assessment. Following teacher union resistance to this proposal, Education Minister Ruairí Quinn proposed the replacement of the state examinations with the school-based Junior Cycle Student Award where 40% credit would be awarded for school-based assignments and 60% for written examinations to be administered and corrected by students’ own teachers (Walshe 2014). Following further teacher trade union resistance (Gleeson, Klenowski, and Looney 2020; Murchan 2018), much negotiation, and a change of Minister, the current compromise arrangements were put in place. The revised Framework (DES 2015, 35) sought ‘an appropriate balance [between] the different types of learning … allow[ing] for a more rounded assessment of the educational achievements of each young person’. The new Junior Cycle Profile of Achievement documents each individual student’s learning achievements in Assessment Tasks specified by the NCCA. These Task reports, which are completed during class time²⁰, are sent to the SEC for assessment.²¹ This Profile also includes the results of scaled-back examinations provided by the SEC at the end of third year whose purpose is to assess a sample of subject learning curriculum outcomes.²² It remains commonplace, however, to hear frequent media and public references to the Junior Certificate examinations although these were replaced by Junior Cycle examinations in the revised Framework.

Whereas Irish curriculum has traditionally been content- rather than assessment-led (Looney and Klenowski 2008), syllabus documents are now being replaced by curriculum specifications, set out in terms what students ‘should be able to do’ in the areas of knowledge, understanding, skills and values.²³ Following an introductory overview, the common template for LC specifications has two main headings – ‘Strands of Study’ and ‘Assessment’. The former are broken down into sub-topics, each with several desired learning outcomes and key skills, and it is left to the teacher to design appropriate learning experiences.

Both NCCA and SEC are guided by Anderson and Kratwhol’s (2001) modified versions of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. This taxonomy provides guidance for the development of learning outcomes ²⁴, and assessment criteria (high, moderate, and low achievement) for all curriculum specifications. The relevant SEC Manual advises the drafters and setters of examination papers to ‘to reflect Bloom’s taxonomy to the greatest extent possible’ (SEC n.d.).²⁵ It goes on to observe that, since affective outcomes ‘are particularly difficult to assess by means of a written examination’, they are ‘not specified as assessment objectives for the purposes of certification’ (50).

Taking the LC Economics curriculum specification as an example, the written examination will assess students’ knowledge and understanding of economics, their application to economic issues and problems, and their ability to analyse and evaluate information and form evidence-based argument that is reasonable and logical. Students are also required to submit a report, which must be based on their own work²⁶, on a ‘research study’ in accordance with a brief issued by the SEC. The report should demonstrate student ability to research and process relevant and meaningful economic data and draw informed conclusions.

At the present time however, some 75% of LC subjects remain in syllabus rather than curriculum specification form. The focus of these established syllabuses, many of which are quite dated, is clearly on subject content, and seven LC syllabuses – Ancient Greek, Applied Mathematics, Construction Studies, Engineering, Hebrew Studies, Latin, Physics and Chemistry – include neither objectives or assessment information. Other syllabuses include general statements such as ‘the syllabus will be assessed in relation to the syllabus objectives’, while the Biology, Chemistry and Geography documents simply provide basic information regarding the number and weighting of examination papers. Having conducted an audit of LC syllabus documents, this author’s awareness levels of between-subject differences have certainly increased.²⁷

The Leaving Certificate examinations process

Notwithstanding the significant amount of information provided on the SEC website²⁸, the state examinations process receives far more attention in the print media (see McCormack, Gleeson, and O’Donoghue 2020) than in academic journals. The following aspects of this process are now considered: the establishment and consistency of performance standards; setting examination papers: developing and adjusting marking schemes; and the use of attainment referencing.

The SEC (2019, 6) statement regarding the purpose of the examinations clearly recognises the importance of a coherent relationship between curriculum and assessment:

… to measure the extent to which each candidate has fulfilled the objectives of the relevant syllabus, in order to provide a certified record of the candidate’s level of achievement [and that] an examination must … facilitate candidates in displaying knowledge and understanding of the syllabus content and in demonstrating the skills specified.

Subject content standards are developed using what the SEC (2021) calls a ‘college of professionals’ approach with the relevant NCCA Development Group²⁹ being a key player. The Commission then puts ‘these content standards into effect as a set of performance standards [and] seek[s] to ensure that the standards remain consistent over time’ (1). The notion of content standards is becoming problematic in an international environment where the focus is on learning outcomes, which provide the basis for performance standards in the case of curriculum specifications.

However, since the focus of the 29 extant LC subject syllabuses is on subject content³⁰ rather than curriculum or assessment objectives, the development of subject syllabus performance standards ‘may require the objectives to be inferred’ (SEC, 40). It seems reasonable to presume that this is also how performance standards were arrived at prior to the establishment of the SEC in 2003. Since today’s performance standards are not set out in any official document (McManus 2018), they are not subject to public scrutiny. Against that background, it is reasonable to entertain genuine concerns regarding the validity of the examinations and the integrity of the curriculum/assessment relationship.

Once performance standards have been established for new curriculum specifications, the SEC, in collaboration with the NCCA and the DES, prepares and publishes exemplar items and sample examination papers. Feedback is provided by the relevant NCCA Development Group members and DES Inspectors, and by other sources including associated in-career development teams and reactions received by the SEC and NCCA. The setting of challenging and realistic examination papers is a complex undertaking (DeWitt et al. 2013) and SEC (2019, 11) states that their papers should be ‘clear, precise, [with] language appropriate to the examination level [and] amenable to completion by the generality of candidates in the time available’. Draft exam papers are reviewed by nominees of the universities who may make recommendations to the chief examiner (McManus 2018). While the difficulty levels of examination papers will inevitably vary from year to year, in its efforts to ensure consistency of standards over time, the Commission aims to set examinations that are representative of previous years’ papers (see SEC 2019, 11).

Examination setters³¹ are required to develop marking schemes and assessment grids in conjunction with their draft examination papers ‘to facilitate a spread of grades across the available range’ (SEC n.d., 9). The purpose of such grids is to: (a) ensure that each examination satisfies the requirements of the relevant syllabus/specification; (b) ‘chart a progression through questions that elicit the lower-order skills of knowledge, comprehension and application to those that additionally require the higher-order skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation, as appropriate to the subject and level’ (49). The difficulties associated with this latter goal are noted by FitzPatrick and Schulz (2015, 150), who found that ‘the vast majority of [Canadian Science] assessments … were rated below the cognitive level of the outcome’.

These state examination papers cannot, for obvious reasons, be pre-tested in the same way as standardised tests. There is the further difficulty that Irish grade boundaries are, unlike those in some other jurisdictions, set in stone. Now, the SEC operates on the assumption that, when student cohort size and student numbers are very large, grade distribution will be similar from year to year. When deviations occur in the marks for a particular subject in a particular year, the SEC believes that these deviations are much more likely to be due to problems with the particular examination paper rather than the ability levels of the student cohort. This means that their ‘primary mechanism for dealing with fluctuations in the difficulty of the examination is the marking scheme’ (SEC 2021, 3).

Some fifty years since the I.C.E. Committee Report and Madaus and McNamara’s (1970) critical findings regarding the reliability and validity of the LC examination, there is a widespread belief that, when fluctuations occur, the Irish examination system is in thrall to the bell-shaped curve. The reality, however, is that the SEC uses attainment referencing³² which draws on ‘both qualitative judgement and statistical information’ (Opposs et al. 2020, 198). The basic principle here is that, in such circumstances, students are not judged ‘in terms of clearly specified performance criteria [but] on the basis of their overall level of attainment in the curriculum area being examined [and] that students with the same overall level of attainment should be awarded the same grade’ (Newton 2011, 20–21).

Notwithstanding the efforts of the current NCCA and SEC to achieve coherence between curriculum and assessment, certain issues are deserving of attention:

• Performance standards remain unpublished, with the standards for subject syllabuses being arrived at by a process of inference. With some three-quarters of LC subjects still in syllabus form, this raises serious questions around openness, transparency and accountability.

• LC grades have no defined meanings – other than their values in CAO points. As Minister Quinn said in 2013, ‘the Leaving Certificate has been captured by the Points System’.

• Subject marking schemes are subject to amendment, in order to facilitate consistency in grade distribution over time. Our grade bands are predetermined and these marking schemes are not published until the examination results have been announced.

• In the case of attainment referencing, how is ‘overall level of attainment’ defined? By whom?

Discussion

The importance of coherence between curriculum and assessment is recognised in the increased levels of SEC/NCCA collaboration around the development of standards, and in the simultaneous development of examination papers, marking schemes and assessment grids at the SEC end. However, this relationship remains a source of concern, and some of the associated policy issues are now considered, along with the influence of the state examinations on student learning, and the role of the teacher in national assessment and certification.

Curriculum and assessment policy issues

As the dominance of Classical Humanist ideology³³ (OECD 1991, 68) waned, it was replaced by human capital production (Hannan and Shortall 1991; O’Sullivan 2005), neo-liberal values (Lynch, Grummel, and Devine 2012), and globalisation forces (Gleeson, Klenowski, and Looney 2020). Learning outcomes³⁴ have become a key feature of the Irish education system at all levels, including higher education (Gleeson 2013), as curriculum designers focus on learning skills and competences rather than teaching content knowledge (Dempsey, Doyle, and Looney 2021).

This significant shift is confronting for teachers whose apprenticeships of observation (Lortie 1975) and professional formation are grounded in an Anglo-Saxon/American curriculum culture. A motion passed at the ASTI’s 2021 Annual Conference called on the NCCA to ‘include depth of treatment and range of subject knowledge, in the design template of all future Leaving Certificate specifications, including those currently under development’ (Wall 2021).³⁵

However, while our traditional subject syllabuses include much information regarding subject content, their treatment of curriculum objectives ranges from fair to non-existent, leaving the SEC to resort to inference when arriving at performance standards. It is noteworthy that the Assistant Head of the SEC’s Examination and Assessment Division recognises the ‘relatively unsophisticated public discourse’ (McManus 2018, 169) regarding the comparability of grades across different subjects, and the ‘inherent (false) assumption that grades obtained in different subjects [and years] are equivalent’ (159). Other factors associated with these low levels of sophistication include the practice of affording students a generous choice of examination questions with varying intellectual challenges, meaning that ‘the comparability of marks awarded on the same paper is questionable on two accounts – the material, and the taxonomic level of the questions chosen by candidates’ (Madaus and McNamara 1970, 17).

The extent of newspaper analysis of Irish examinations is equalled only in New York and Egypt (Baird et al. 2015). Given the centrality of achievement standards and grading procedures in the points race for allocating higher education places, it is remarkable that the failure to publish examination standards has received relatively attention, notwithstanding the SEC’s commitment to openness, transparency and accountability. As O’Leary (2020, 180) suggests, it may be time to re-consider ‘the delicate task of maintaining a balance between the public’s confidence in the LC and informing the public about the implications of measurement error for setting and maintaining standards [by conducting] studies to calculate inter-rater reliability coefficients and standard error measurements for LC subjects’ and publishing the results'.

Pursuant to the argument of Lok, McNaught, and Young (2016, 461) that learning outcomes ‘can only be assessed with any validity by a criterion-referenced approach’, the inclusion of general assessment criteria in recent curriculum specifications may be indicative of a tentative move in that direction.³⁶ One can only imagine however the difficulty of reducing large numbers of learning outcomes to meaningful performance standards of manageable proportions. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen what effect these new assessment criteria will have on the regrettable modern tendency to see the meaning of LC grades simply in terms of CAO point scores.

NCCA and SEC continue to rely on taxonomies of educational objectives with their measurable action verbs. Following the victory of Thorndike’s behaviourism over Dewey’s pragmatism (Sugrue 2008), the pre-determined nature of behavioural objectives emphasises the product rather than the process. This practice is especially questionable at a time when the primary focus of curriculum reforms is on learning and key skills (Gleeson, Klenowski, and Looney 2020). While managerialist behavioural objectives are appropriate for skills training and instruction, they are unsuitable for the induction of students into disciplinary knowledge (Stenhouse 1975). Unintended, serendipitous, outcomes are discounted when educational success is predicated on ‘a determinate and linear universe [that] fits well with the [prevailing] managerialisms [and] populist political position[s]’ (Knight 2001, 372).

Since Irish grade boundaries are pre-defined in percentage terms, the SEC must employ attainment referencing in its attempts to maintain consistent grade distribution patterns over time. This approach, which hardly features in the associated Irish discourse, involves the use of a single criterion that provides ‘a general indication of the kinds of knowledge, skill and understanding that might well be associated with the award of a particular grade’ (Newton 2011, 20). It is premised on the belief that changing grade distribution patterns are indications of the relative ease or difficulty of particular exam papers/questions. This starting point would appear to exclude the influence of learning environment factors such as social disadvantage, teacher supply, dysfunctional school leadership, unsatisfactory teaching. And what about the possible impact of pedagogical innovations such as on-line learning or constructivist active learning, as championed, for example, in the ‘Junior Cycle for Teachers’ continuing professional development programmes?

LC influence on student learning

Over half a century ago Madaus and McNamara (1970, 15) concluded that the LC examinations simply ‘measured the lower-level cognitive outcomes such as the learning and retention of information’. Some twenty years later, the OECD (1991, 75) Examiners would highlight the prevalence of ‘didactic instruction [and] the current preoccupation with book and verbal knowledge accompanied by instructional modes of teaching and regurgitative practices in assessment and examinations’ where the emphasis was on ‘competitive assessments of the “visible” products of learning [and the] structuring of lessons around texts’. In the absence of a philosophical underpinning, meeting ‘the examiner’s expectations … has become more important than any kind of generative inquiry’ (Long 2008, 125).

The SEC-commissioned Baird et al. (2015) study³⁷ invited independent subject experts to analyse LC examinations in six selected areas – Biology, English, Geography, Economics, Design and Communications Graphics, French. While concluding that these examinations were not very problematically predictable, they considered examinations in the latter three subjects to be ‘problematically predictable’. Students’ comments reflected favourably on SEC marking schemes insofar as they saw good grades as indicative of broad and deep understanding and an ability to apply knowledge. Although many students felt ‘they could predict the examination questions well’ (20), this was not reflected in their grades. With courses being ‘so broad that they could not predict the entire examination with any degree of certainty’ (87), most students reported an over-reliance on drilling and memorisation, ‘such that those with the best understanding of a discipline did not necessarily get the highest grades’ (Baird, Caro, and Hopfenbeck 2016, 372). Teacher respondents generally disagreed with the subject experts’ findings and with students’ opinions regarding exam predictability

Redolent of Baird et al. (2016), and consistent with studies of the assessment of various individual subjects (Breathnach 1989; Cullinane 2012; McCrudden 2008), Burns et al. (2018, 366) identified a ‘predominance of lower order processing in the Leaving Certificate both in the assessment instruments and in the performance of tasks by students, in particular the skill of recall’. This led them to conclude that the LC assessment instruments ‘do not gather evidence of deployment of students’ skills for many subjects [and that] only a few subjects³⁸ show evidence of some balance of questions requiring higher and lower order processing skills’ (367). McManus (2018) suggests that the current process for establishing LC standards may hinder the use of higher-order exam questions, and agrees with Baird et al. (2015) regarding the need for more frequent revision of syllabuses³⁹, with more emphasis on the assessment of higher-order thinking skills.

Drawing on the ESRI’s important longitudinal study of a cohort of post-primary students, Smyth (2016, 169) observes that students’ reactions to teacher-centred classrooms ‘contrasted sharply with [their] own preferences regarding learning approaches’. However, although students ‘consistently favoured more active teaching approaches as compared to more “boring” traditional approaches’, when confronted by the high-stakes LC exam, they ‘shifted focus towards a more instrumentalist view of exam preparation [where] teaching to the test became the signal of a good lesson’. They saw grinds ‘as a more efficient way’ of preparing for the LC and expressed ‘intolerance of teachers who do not focus on what is likely to appear on the examination papers’ (197).

The generic statement displayed prominently at the very beginning of all LC syllabus documents declares that all high-quality programmes should emphasise the importance of self-directed learning, independent thought, a spirit of inquiry, critical thinking, problem solving, self-reliance, initiative, enterprise, and lifelong learning. As Burns et al. (2018, 367) concluded, these goals ‘are not reflected in the written assessment instruments where there is an emphasis on recall of knowledge and a low emphasis on higher order skill’. Yet another example of Ireland’s rhetoric/reality dichotomy (Lee 1989; Ryan 1984).

For all its perceived fairness and objectivity, the capacity of the LC examination to identify and reward higher cognitive learning outcomes is limited.⁴⁰ When asked to call ‘heads or tails’, LC students generally choose ‘tails’, confirmation of Minister Quinn’s 2013 remark that ‘the Points System has distorted behaviour at school level’.

The role of the teacher

The available evidence echoes the conclusion of Kellaghan and Madaus (2002, 592)⁴¹:

[When] the examination comes to define the curriculum [and] the knowledge and skills required to do well relate for the most part to the recall or recognition of factual information … students will spend much of their time in rote memorisation, routine drilling, and the accumulation of factual knowledge, which in turn may inhibit … the development of higher order and transferable skills.

Redolent of this conclusion, and the observations of OECD (1991) and Gilleece et al. (2009)⁴², Smyth (2016, 176) reports that the prevailing teacher-dominated pedagogy for sixth year students in the ESRI longitudinal study placed a ‘strong emphasis on practising previous exam papers [and on] the topics “predicted” to appear in the exam’. Marking schemes, now published annually, have become the real guide to what material should be ‘covered’ and students are encouraged to use them in their own study (Blair et al, 2015), and many teachers become SEC examiners to acquire deeper insights into the application of these schemes. As observed by Baird et al. (2015), the breadth of Irish subject syllabuses encourages such teaching towards the exam, and textbook dependency. While there is a paucity of research on SEC sample papers and LC ‘mock examinations’, it is likely that they also influence teachers’ practice.

Some 50 years ago the I.C.E. Committee Report (Government of Ireland 1975, 56) suggested that our dependency on external examinations ‘reflected a noted lack of confidence in the professional work of teachers [when] many of the old constraints, [that had been] devised for a largely untrained profession, still control the classroom’. Almost twenty years later, all ten members of the NCCA Working Party (1992, 9ff) on Junior Certificate Assessment⁴³, including teacher union nominees, signed off on the recommendation ‘that [cross-moderated] school-based oral, aural, practical, project work and assignments should be an integral part of the final assessment process’.

This recommendation was subsequently rejected by the ASTI (1999, 3) on the familiar grounds that the perception of the teacher as advocate rather than judge is a ‘major strength’ of our examination system, and that ‘school-based assessment by the pupil’s own teacher for state certification purposes would [be to] the detriment of all concerned [and] result in a distancing between the teacher, the pupil and the parent’. Following publication of DES Circular M31/93, the LCA Steering Committee, which included two ASTI nominees, unanimously agreed that, in keeping with the student-centred nature of the programme, teachers, would contribute to the assessment of their own students for national certification (Gleeson 2010). Less than one month later, this plan was vetoed at that Union’s 1995 Annual Conference.

Whereas ASTI opposition to school-based assessment for national certification has been unwavering, the TUI’ s volte face is particularly significant. TUI members willingly engaged in school-based assessment during the CDU’s Humanities and ISCIP⁴⁴ Projects, while their further and higher education members are actively engaged in the assessment of their own students, and their President, Ed Riordan, told the National Education Convention in 1993 that they were prepared to undertake school-based assessment on three important conditions: suitable remuneration, appropriate ‘training’, and provision for cross-moderation.

Irish teachers are trusted SEC examination markers, and nobody is better placed to assess a student’s achievement than her/his teacher. Whereas the I.C.E. Committee’s concerns regarding teacher confidence were valid in 1975, teaching is now an all-graduate, self-regulated profession and the one-year Higher Diploma in Education has been replaced with a two-year Professional Master’s in Education (PME). In the context of junior cycle reform (DES 2015), teachers are increasingly seen as curriculum makers (Dempsey, Doyle, and Looney 2021) with significant autonomy and freedom to achieve the prescribed learning outcomes. Given the importance of the curriculum/ assessment relationship, calls for the reconceptualisation of teachers’ roles in assessment (Looney et al. 2018, 455) deserve to be heard.

The assessment debate inevitably brings us back to the significance of culture. Trade union rejection of the Minister’s junior cycle proposals for school-based assessment for national certification was predicated on the belief that, within their distinctive ‘educational and cultural context [this] would expose [teachers] to undue pressure [in the local community]’ (Travers 2015, 1). Such cultural impediments do not arise however in ‘high trust’ education systems such as Finland, Norway, and Queensland, Australia (Sahlberg and Walker 2021; Tveit 2014; Allen 2012). When the introduction of external examinations was mooted by the Australian federal government, the Queensland Teachers’ Union (2015, 39) declared its opposition to assessment models which are ‘external to the school [and] endors[ed] models which are criteria-based, standards-referenced, school-based, continuous and developmental’. In the event of mandated external assessment, they proposed that school-based assessments have a weighting of at least 75%. The context is, of course, very different, insofar as school-based curriculum development was a key feature of Australian schooling for many years (Skilbeck 1981; Kennedy 1992),

The on-going assessment debate raises substantive issues including trust and professionalism, with ‘trust in teachers … regarded as the key driver of high educational performance in Finnish schools’ (Sahlberg and Walker 2021, 50). These schools are characterised by learning-focused assessment and teacher education programmes that provide ‘a good foundational understanding of how to assess learning and growth’ (41). As Trant (1998, 27) puts it, the development of trust involves devolution of responsibility to teachers, who ‘cannot claim the status of professionalism until they assume full responsibility towards all aspects of the curriculum … and this includes assessment’. For example, student assessment in the Didaktik German system ‘still builds on the teacher knowing the pupils personally and arriving at a more or less "holistic" picture of them' (Waldow 2014, 328). In this cultural context, fair procedures are grounded in teachers' professionalism rather than their "mechanical sorting of students" through psychometric test systems' (329). Notwithstanding the growing influence of marketisation in that country, Swedish teachers also retain primary responsibility for grading their pupils on a holistic basis, while attempting to balance professionalism with national tests that are 'not supposed to replace teachers' judgement but to indirectly standardise their assessment' (331).

The teacher as advocate or judge debate should not be seen as an either/or argument. Waldow (339) concludes from his comparative study of examination systems in Germany, Norway and England that 'what is considered fair... can only be adequately understood by looking at examination systems in conjunction with their social context and their path-dependent history' (see also Tahirsylaj 2019; Molstad 2015). Contrasting the approaches to assessment in Didaktik and Anglo-Saxon systems, Waldow (331-332) concludes that 'in Germany and Sweden teachers combine the roles of instructor and judge (in the sense of judging what pupils have learned). In England, teachers do not judge pupils themselves (at least in examinations) but try to coach them as highly as possible in the external examinations'.

The cooperation of irish teachers with the alternative grading systems introduced during COVID-19 is noteworthy. According to McGuire (Irish Times, 25 May, 2021), ‘a growing minority of teachers may be softening somewhat to an ongoing and more extensive use of a calculated or accredited grading system in future assessment processes, particularly for more vulnerable groups’. A recent study of the underlying beliefs of some 525 Irish post-primary teachers would also suggest that the current junior cycle assessment policy (DES 2015) may have occasioned some re-conceptualisation of the teacher’s role insofar as Darmody, Lysaght, and O’Leary (2020, 516) report an unexpectedly ‘nuanced understanding of summative assessment purposes [and an] openness to classroom-based assessment’ that may arise from teacher engagement with these reforms.

Finally, from the perspective of education structures, current levels of engagement between the Teaching Council (TC), with its remit for teacher professionalism, and NCCA/SEC with their remits for curriculum and assessment, might be characterised as minimal. For example, the TC’s Code of Professional Practice includes no reference whatsoever to assessment⁴⁵, while it includes just one reference to curriculum development. Should teachers continue, post-COVID, to engage in the assessment of their own LC students for national certification, this would surely have implications for the Code. And what about the assessment of LC candidates in unrecognised grind schools whose staff are not required to register with the TC?

Concluding remarks

Rather than being externally examined on two years’ work, students taking the modular LCA programme gradually accumulate two/thirds of their credits for school-based Units and Tasks, followed by state exams at the end of their second year. The fact that new LC curriculum specifications make provision for externally examined, school-based, assessment components would suggest that lessons have been learned from the LCA. The high-stakes nature of the LC, however, means that the authenticity of students’ reports on such tasks will need careful monitoring, given the ready accessibility of internet-based ‘essay mills’ for those who can afford them

Whereas Irish curriculum discourse and policy are heavily influenced by Anglo-Saxon/American curriculum culture with its focus on knowledge transmission, students in the alternative Didaktik curriculum culture, with its focus on personal formation (Tahirsylaj 2019; Gleeson 2021), are seen as makers of meaning. The protracted debate regarding the place of History in the core curriculum at junior cycle is indicative of the obvious tensions between these very different traditions. Although several of the ‘Statements of Learning’ set out in the Framework for Junior Cycle (DES 2015) are of direct relevance to history, this subject’s core status was reinstated following a strong campaign by the History Teachers’ Association (Humphreys 2015) and many high-profile figures.⁴⁶ However, this particular curriculum culture may not necessarily continue to prevail. After all, while traditional Catholic culture remained dominant in Ireland right into the 1980s, its influence has waned considerably as evidenced by Scally (2021), O'Toole (2021) and others.

While consideration of the NCCA’s senior cycle recommendations is ongoing at time of writing, the eventual outcome will be a good indicator of the direction of travel for Irish curriculum culture. As Biesta (2006, 24) puts it, the prevailing neo-liberal ideology ‘facilitates an economic understanding of the process of education] [where] the provider is there to satisfy the customer [and] it [is] very difficult to raise questions about the content and purpose of education other than in terms of what the “customer” or the market wants’.

The OECD has played a very influential, ‘cultural stranger’, role in Irish education (O’Sullivan 2005), although its observations have not always been taken to heart, with its 1991 Examiners’ report getting ‘the cold shoulder’ treatment (Gleeson 2010). Many of the issues outlined in the current paper are reflected in the concerns expressed by OECD Director, Andreas Schleicher (Carl O’Brien, Irish Times, 22 March, 2021).

[Irish education is] very much a 20th century kind of education … quite industrial in its outlook and its design [and] quite heavily focused on the reproduction of subject matter content, and not that much focus on getting students to think out of the box and link across the boundaries of subject matter disciplines … Just 15 per cent of Irish 15-year-olds can distinguish fact from opinion in a reliable way.

While a number of substantive assessment and examinations issues have been identified above, it is important to acknowledge the complex nature of assessment for national certification, and the difficulty of achieving a congruous curriculum/assessment relationship. Drawing on case studies in five educational contexts in the UK and Europe, Daugherty et al. (2008, 253) characterise that relationship in terms of a multi-layered process, ‘with numerous influences at work … from the national system to the individual learner’. This leads them to the conclusion that, ‘rather than thinking in terms of aligning assessment more closely to curriculum, the construction of learning outcomes is better understood as a complex, non-linear, interacting system with the ultimate goal being a synergy that embraces curriculum, pedagogy and assessment’.

The latter findings lend support to Torrance’s (2011) contention that the notion of ‘a perfectly integrated and functioning curriculum and assessment system’ may be something of a chimera that is ‘neither feasible nor desirable’ insofar as it ‘outstretches systemic capacity’ (459). Meanwhile, those who regard measurable learning outcomes as essential for accountability would do well to consider Hopmann’s (2015, 18) perception of assessment in the Anglo-Saxon/American tradition as a futile attempt ‘to nail jelly to the wall [where] all that gets stuck is the nail, the test, which in this case represents the yardstick, which then unabashedly becomes the actual goal of teaching’.

Acknowledgement

This paper arose out of the preparation of written and oral submissions to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. The Clerk of that Committee invited the author to make a submission regarding the relationship between curriculum and assessment in Irish post-primary education. The author wishes to acknowledge the kind assistance of senior NCCA and SEC officials in the preparation of that submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jim Gleeson

Dr Jim Gleeson is an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Education, Dublin City University. He has worked as a post-primary teacher, SPIRAL 2 Project Leader (1983-87), NCCA Development Officer, Leaving Certificate Applied (1993-95), and independent curriculum evaluator for European Studies (Ireland and Great Britain), Exploring Masculinities and other developments. Jim worked as a teacher educator at Thomond College of Education (TCE) (1981-1991), becoming Head of Department when TCE joined the University of Limerick in 1991. He was Professor of Identity and Curriculum in Catholic Education at Australian Catholic University, Brisbane, from 2013-2018. Jim's main research interests include: education and curriculum policy; curriculum development, evaluation and practice; teacher professionalism and development; faith-based education.

Notes

1 Drawing on Habermas

2 As against commercial market (e.g. USA) and quasi-market (e.g. India) approaches. According to Baird et al. (2018) national examinations are run by an arms-length body set up by a government’s education ministry are commonly used amongst the 20 standard setting systems considered in their study.

3 Apart from, e.g. the introduction of oral examinations in Languages and project in some Humanities and practical subjects.

4 DES Circular Letter M31/93 authorises three Leaving Certificate programmes: the traditional Leaving Certificate (Established), the Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme (LCVP) and the Leaving Certificate Applied (LCA). For purposes of the current paper Leaving Certificate refers to the Established programme.

5 Established by the Intermediate Education Board for Ireland prior to Irish Independence.

6 The range of secondary school subjects was rather limited at this time.

7 The Intermediate Certificate Examination was normally taken at the end of third year by students attending secondary schools.

8 Representatives of the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland (ASTI) and school management were included, with deferential treatment being afforded university nominees.

9 Moderation and Educational Assessment System (MEAS).

10 The Committee also proposed the establishment of a Teaching Council to promote teacher professionalism. It would take a further thirty years for this to be established.

11 Seanad Eireann Reports, 1981, vol. 96, col. 517

12 Issues and Structures.

13 Albert, a former Senior Inspector in the Department of Education, and Head of their Curriculum Unit, had also been the CEO of the Interim CEB.

14 The role of the NCCA has always been advisory.

15 Kellaghan, Madaus, and Raczek (1996) would remark that, when ‘students focus their efforts on strategies to help them over the examination hurdle rather than on developing mastery of subject matter and honing lasting competences [and when] teachers are more controlling in their teaching … the curriculum is narrows to what is embodied in the tradition of past examinations’.

16 Whereas O’Sullivan (2005) rightly identifies the influence exercised by ‘cultural strangers’ such as the OECD on Irish education policy, the situation is arguably more nuanced insofar as, while Investment in Education has been hugely influential (Harford 2018), their critical 1991 report did not receive a great deal of attention.

17 Established by Micheál Martin, then Minister for Education.

18 For early childhood education, primary and post-primary schools.

19 This particular wording might be considered rather strange.

20 For example, the Geography Assessment Task will assess students’ ability to reflect on the development of their geographical thinking and on the skills they have developed, and to evaluate new knowledge or understanding that has emerged through their experience of the Classroom-Based Assessment, and their capacity to apply same to unfamiliar situations in the future.

21 Each being allocated 10% of the marks.

22 These written examinations will ‘be of no longer than two hours duration in a maximum of ten subjects. The final examination will be available at a common level apart from English, Mathematics and Irish where there will be two levels (higher and ordinary) available’ (DES 2015, 41).

23 For example, the number of junior cycle learning outcomes ranges from Business Studies (27) to English (48), while the Leaving Certificate Agricultural Science and Economics specifications include 101 and 87 learning outcomes respectively.

24 Glossaries of appropriate behavioural action verbs are included in the various curriculum specifications.

25 In the event that the syllabus contains insufficient detail regarding the underlying taxonomy’ (49) the Manual includes some five pages and an Appendix explaining Bloom’s (1965) taxonomy of educational objectives, while Simpson’s psychometer taxonomy is also referenced.

26 Authentication procedures are put in place to ensure compliance.

27 It also brings to mind Mulcahy’s (1981) criticisms regarding a disregard for aims!

28 See references for relevant SEC publications.

29 With the approval of NCCA Boards of Studies and the full Council.

30 A small number of syllabuses allocate ‘precise weightings to particular assessment objectives or content areas’.

31 The SEC appoints and trains personnel with appropriate subject expertise and experience as drafters and setters on the basis of past experience and performance rather than publicly advertised contest.

32 also employed in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

33 The Examiners characterised the Irish second-level curriculum as ‘a derivation from the Classical Humanist tradition’.

34 Parallel to Performance Indicators at the policy level.

35 Similar sentiments have been expressed by various contributors to the Irish Times (see Gleeson 2021).

36 The award of a moderate grade might display very good mastery of certain aspects of the course while being poor on others, whereas candidates whose grades are at the highest level must display similar characteristics across the board.

37 Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment.

38 English, Art, Music, History, Classical Studies.

39 Any such proposal is likely to be resisted vigorously because of its implications for the relevance of existing text-books.

40 It is particularly interesting that, in January 2022, LC students are protesting outside of Leinster House, demanding the retention of the hybrid model of Leaving Certificate assessment employed in 2021.

41 International Handbook of Educational Evaluation entry on external public examinations.

42 Findings of 2008 TALIS report for Ireland.

43 Murphy Report.

44 Integrated Science Curriculum Innovation Project.

45 Compare with Scotland and NI.

46 The allocation of 400 hours to the mandatory ‘Wellbeing’ ‘subject’ was also challenged because of its perceived impact on the time available for traditional subjects.