Towards a Better Future

Towards a Better Future: A Review of the Irish School System
Junior and Senior Cycle Curriculum, 2000-2009
During the first years of the new millennium, debate continued about the reform of junior and
Senior Cycle curriculum and assessment. Research undertaken by the ESRI provided new insights
into the effect of the Junior Certificate on student participation and achievement. It noted that
many students became disengaged at an early stage of Junior Cycle. It found a curriculum that was
seen as inflexible and overcrowded, with relatively little flexibility for teacher or students. It
highlighted the dominating effect of the Junior Certificate examination on teaching and learning,
and indicated the narrow range of assessment activity (Smyth et al, 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2011).
However, efforts by the NCCA to reform the
Junior Certificate met with resistance from the
teaching profession. Proposals for reform of
Leaving Certificate assessment presented by the
NCCA to Minister for Education Mary
Hanafin in 2005 were met with scepticism by
the Minister, who described them as a ‘Rolls
Royce’ model of change (Murray, 2007).
In 2007, the NCCA announced that the syllabus
for two new Leaving Certificate exam subjects
– Physical Education and Politics and Society –
would be sent to schools within a year, as would
proposals for revised assessment of the three
Leaving Certificate science subjects, Physics,
“
Research undertaken by
the ESRI provided new
insights into the effect of
the Junior Certificate on
student participation and
achievement. It noted that
many students became
disengaged at an early
stage of Junior Cycle.
”
Chemistry and Biology. However, there was to be considerable delay in moving forward in all of
these areas. The ASTI made it clear that their members would not support ‘ill-judged, superficial or
inadequately resourced reform’. They would support change ‘that is valid in itself, is in the interests
of their pupils, and which does not undermine the strengths of the education system’ (Murray, 2007).
Questions were also raised about the model of curriculum reform and implementation that was
beginning to be adopted by the NCCA. Teachers (especially secondary teachers) had in the past been
familiar with a technicist approach to curriculum where the teacher’s role was to implement a
clearly-defined curriculum, prescribed centrally. The rationale underpinning the NCCA’s new model
of curriculum planning was informed by the practice perspective on curriculum ‘with its associated
emphasis on teacher agency in any change and development process’ (Looney, 2014 and Hammond
et al, 2011). While in itself, this model is to be welcomed (see Chapter 1), for many second-level
teachers, who were comfortable with exam-led and textbook-based approaches, the new approach
would be quite a challenge.
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