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Education Minister Joe McHugh said it is “too early to say” whether the schools will reopen entirely in September amid concerns about social distancing requirements due to Covid-19.
McHugh said he has established an advisory group to examine the issue and said the group “will work to open schools.”
“I am going to work with the advisory group that I have established and that work will continue. We will be working with all stakeholders and I already started the conversation several weeks ago. With many stakeholders, whether post-primary or primary, we will work to open schools because the advice of the NPHET (National Public Health Emergency Team) is that schools will reopen in September, so the question now is how can we do it safely and I think it’s too early to say what that will look like. But that is the work that we have started and we will continue working through it. ”
He said he wanted a “proper consultation” on the subject.
McHugh announced Friday that state tests will not be held this summer for the first time in nearly 100 years as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Instead, students will have the option of receiving grades calculated by their teachers based on their schoolwork or passing written exams in late 2020 or early 2021, subject to public health counseling.
Mr. McHugh denied that the new test results calculation system will see some students be unfairly graded after the Labor Party expressed concern about the school profile.
“The school profile is nowhere within any of the guidelines. If there are students in Deis schools who have performed incredibly well and worked hard for the past two years, that will be the result they will receive across their school, not just the teacher and not just the principal but the entire school. evaluation, ”McHugh told RTÉ’s The Week in Politics.
“You could have a situation where once a principal submits the results from any school, be it a community school, a Deis school, a private school, where the system will analyze some students who may be marked too severely, some students could be marked lenient, there will be different evaluations. I want to say categorically that any student, just because they go to a certain school, that they will be marked differently than anyone else, it’s just not the case. “
ASTI
Meanwhile, the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) is recommending its members to participate in the grading process calculated for this year’s Leaving Cert so that students can advance to the next stage of their lives.
The teachers union has a longstanding policy of teachers not evaluating their students for the purpose of obtaining state certification. He says this policy guarantees the integrity of the state testing process, the value of which he says “is infinitely superior to any other process.”
Union President Deirdre Mac Donald said the process described by McHugh on Friday “is far from ideal. However, we will strive to improve the process to offer fairness, objectivity and fairness to all students and protect professional integrity of teachers, “he said.
ASTI says it is concerned with a number of issues including: the data teachers should trust in the calculated grading process; equity and perceived objectivity for students; and concerns related to the professional integrity of teachers and school leaders.
Parental pressure
On Saturday, another of the nation’s top teacher unions called for clear “safeguards” to prevent parents from putting pressure on teachers over Leaving Cert’s calculated grades.
The Irish Teachers Union (TUI) called for “safeguards to ensure that the professional integrity of teachers is protected” under the new system.
John MacGabhann, TUI Secretary General, said guidelines were needed on what would constitute individuals, such as parents, who are trying to compromise the process of calculating a student’s grades.
“There must be a clear sign that any form of pressure is just inappropriate and will not work,” he told The Irish Times.
After a meeting on Friday, the TUI executive committee approved participating with the calculated grading system.
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