A leading schools guidance counsellor has welcomed the new Leaving Cert calculated grades system as “patently fair.”

The Education Minister Norma Foley this afternoon confirmed that ‘school profiling’ would not be used to calculate grades.

It means students will not be downgraded based on their school previous academic performance.

As a result, some 17% of the grades handed out next week will be downgraded, 4% will be upgraded and just over 79% will remain the same.

The Minister for Education Norma Foley announces details of the Calculated Grades model for Leaving Certificate 2020, 01-09-2020. Image: Julien Behal

On The Hard Shoulder with Kieran Cuddihy this afternoon, Brian Mooney, guidance counsellor and Editor of Education Matters, said the level of downgrades is far lower than feared.

“When you look at some of the downgrades that happened in the UK – where it was mid-30% - the fact that it is 17% is a huge sigh of relief in terms of our system,” he said.

“Effectively we have been sitting on a time-bomb waiting to go off for the last month and, if you look at what is being proposed by the minister today, she seems to have navigated her way through this minefield very effectively.”

Leaving Cert

He said teachers were asked to rank their students as well as provide estimated grades for them.

“Say there was 30 students in a class, the teacher was asked to give the first students the highest mark,” he said.

“If, say there was a 98% and the next student was 75%, that shows that the first student was way ahead.

“In giving the awards and in allocating the grades, they have kept with the grading structure the teachers have submitted, so, where they may have changed individual marks for students, number one still remains number one within that group.

“If you follow the actual award by the teacher – and the teacher is the professional here – they gave first place, second place, third place, right down to the final student.”

"Patently fair"

He said some students will “feel a lot of anger and resentment” when the estimated grades are released but insisted the system appears to be as fair as possible.

“I looked at it very, very carefully last night and went through all the details and it seems to me to be patently fair,” he said.

“You have allowed for a certain amount of grade inflation because of the fact of how the system operated this year.

You have protected the previous year’s students by giving out the extra places to ensure they don’t get squeezed out.

“You have followed the actual order or awards on the basis of the teacher in the classroom and you have not used any comparative school data – and in the data that has been published this afternoon DEIS schools have actually done better out of it than non-DEIS schools.

“I think [Minister Foley] is through the gap here to be truthful.”