School’s out for Christmas and for a select number of secondary students the end of the first term exams in physical education as a Leaving Cert subject; it’s too soon, however, to decide the success or failure of the new PE syllabus.
Since September, and after several decades of hopes and promises, 80 schools have been piloting the new Leaving Cert syllabus. In all 369 schools applied, more than half of the country’s secondary schools, the intention being to open all schools to PE as an exam subject from the autumn of 2020.
The first Leaving Cert PE exams will take place in June 2020, and in the meantime each pilot school has 180 hours allocated for the Leaving Cert course, or PE classes four times a week, plus the two standard classes of PE.
This week the GAA launched its new Online Learning Portal ‘LCPE’ to support the course, open to students and teachers, with the aim of maximising the learning process around their games.
The Leaving Cert exam will come in three parts: a written exam counting for 50 per cent; a coaching or choreographer project counts for 20 per cent; and a digital/video project counting for 30 per cent. Each class chooses three of six categories of activity, Gaelic football, hurling and camogie included in the games element.
According to Professor Niall Moyna, Head of the School of Health and Human Performance at Dublin City University (DCU), also a frontline campaigner to make PE a Leaving Cert subject, the true test of the syllabus is still to come.
“There are issues here from an education perspective. When we look at PE, the people who like sport will take PE, which is great, and they should be recognised for that unique capacity they have to be physically active and play. It’s another form of intelligence, and just as important as other forms on the curriculum,” said Moyna.
“My concern is that it will over-academicise exercise, and there will be less time involved in the activity. We teach sports science and health, and I can tell you there is very little time in the physical activity. It’s getting that balance. But students taking this course will be the first of the new generation with a much broader context of what is involved with sport. They will go back to the community and they will be much better leaders in the future.”
Comprehensive programme
Of the 80 pilot schools, 18 are in Dublin, the rest spread out from St Eunan’s College in Donegal to Scoil Phobail Sliabh Luachra in Kerry, one of the other concerns being it hasn’t been piloted in many working class areas.
Moyna believes PE as an exam subject can impact on the growth of Gaelic games, especially hurling, if only in the short term.
“Indirectly it will,” he says, “because these people will come out with an understanding of physiology, of psychology, of how people learn skills. In the GAA, as an amateur organisation, if you haven’t taken science, it can be daunting when you go in for the first time. Suddenly we will have hundreds of kids with a background in this, and that can only be positive down the road, in the quality and level of coaching.
“It is a very comprehensive programme, but whether it’s soccer or GAA or basketball the same principles will apply, and look at the example of Stephen Cluxton playing badminton, and that transfer of skills from one sport to another. Again, it goes back to motor learning, and a more holistic view. And it’s not so much PE, but a sport science and health curriculum.”
But Moyna believes the current PE curriculum, outside of the exam subject, is not fit for purpose.
“If you go back to health and wellness, I think PE has failed in this country. Not a single kid is tested on an annual basis. I’d say scrap the current PE curriculum, come up with something different, because I don’t think it’s any way appropriate for the 21st century.
“The vast majority of young girls drop out at 14, 15. If they walked for 40 minutes every day for the rest of their life that would have a more significant impact on their health than anything PE could do.”
Access to the GAA portal is free to all teachers and learners. For more see www.gaa.ie
