Here we are on the eve of a new Fianna Fáil-led government taking office for a five-year term. It looks like it will be well into 2025 before we find out who will take the reins at the Department of Education. So, what will be in store when the new minister is installed?
The pre-election political party manifestos indicated that Fianna Fáil was the only party prioritising curriculum redevelopment, the field where I work. The party pledged to “continue the reform of the Leaving Certificate in order to broaden the range of learning and examination approaches involved”.
To her credit, Norma Foley – who has been at the helm of that department since 2020 – has been committed to reforming the 100-year-old and largely unchanged Leaving Certificate since the publication of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment’s (NCCA)’s Senior Cycle Advisory Report in 2022.
This involved a standard partnership or stakeholder model of curriculum policy development, a model nabbed from postwar West Germany where government, unions and business united in social partnership to create economic and social stability; it has been used here since the 1980s for national pay agreements and curriculum development.
In addition to this, Foley also set up a Senior Cycle Redevelopment Delivery Board, a programme management office with a set programme of work and a Senior Cycle Redevelopment Partners’ Forum (a group which includes young people, parents and the inclusion sector).
The standard partnership model which involves representatives from a wide range of groups (including teacher unions, management bodies, Ibec, the Irish Federation of University Teachers, the inspectorate, teacher subject professional networks, and the State Examination Commission among others) gives each group a say in the development of curriculum policy – although student and parent groups are excluded from these deliberations.
If education’s ultimate aim is human flourishing in its multiplicity of manifestations, then curriculum’s role is to provide pathways for all students to develop the competencies to realise their potential and to thrive
While seeming democratic, the wisdom of developing curriculum using this overtly representative model is open to question (some partners may participate with a view to watering down, blocking or undermining any proposed developments). The fact that we have seen so little change in the upper secondary curriculum since the foundation of the State tells its own story. In any case, the NCCA, the statutory body responsible for drafting the curriculum based on the deliberations of partners, can have its advice accepted or rejected by the minister. Ultimately, educational policymaking is the prerogative of the government and specifically the minister for education of the day.
I hope we get a reforming minister, someone with the vision of “the school man” Donogh O’Malley, who, in one fell swoop, introduced the free education scheme. It turned out to be, in the words of JJ Lee, “one of the most important developments in independent Ireland”. Opponents of O’Malley’s Free Scheme argued secondary education for all would be “both financially impractical and educationally unsound ... only a minority would be capable of benefiting from such education and standards would fall”. They said the voluntary system of education worked and preserved “a sense of the value of education”.
Do those unfounded worries about declining standards sound familiar? It’s not a million miles away from the dissenting critics of curriculum redevelopment we are hearing today.
Will broadening the range of learning and assessment opportunities offered at the Leaving Certificate have as big an impact as the free education scheme in 1967? Possibly not, but it does have the potential to positively improve the educational experiences and outcomes for all of the young people in this country and open up broader opportunity to the next generations.
Curriculum is something every single school-going child engages with; from preschool to post-primary, special school to Gaelscoil. Children have a right to have multiple routes open to them through that curriculum. If education’s ultimate aim is human flourishing in its multiplicity of manifestations, then curriculum’s role is to provide pathways for all students to develop the competencies to realise their potential and to thrive.
The Leaving Certificate is not a sorting house for third-level institutions (neither is it, as used to be the case not so far back in its 100-year history, a vehicle to prepare students for vocations or the Civil Service).
For sure, a very important part of senior cycle’s brief is to facilitate the attainment of academic and vocational qualifications, but other aspects of the curriculum’s remit are important too: the socialisation of students and the curriculum’s role in providing a space for students to learn how to navigate the world independently with dignity, empathy, open-mindedness and perseverance; its role in providing the conditions in which students might “try themselves out” so they can readily assume the responsibilities and opportunities of being a human in today’s society.
I hope we get a minister for education who will fund, resource and deliver on the promise of curriculum reform.
Emma Duggan is a teacher and a teacher educator. She is writing in a personal capacity
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