Teachers are being bullied into accepting reforms that will damage education

Irish Times

18-05-2025

Bí Cineálta is an
anti-bullying initiative
for
primary
and
post-primary
schools which begins this September. At the launch, former minister for
education
Norma Foley
said
bullying
can cause significant damage.
And yet there seems to be no problem with bullying and bribing teachers into unconditional acceptance of senior cycle reform, including the flawed model of additional assessments worth 40 per cent of marks. Pay deals already agreed will be clawed back if there is noncompliance.
In April, Education Minister Helen McEntee
announced a measure
designed to encourage teachers to stay in Ireland during a recruitment crisis: teachers would receive a permanent contract after one year instead of two. That measure is now somehow tied in with compliance with the new senior cycle. Shameful.
Teachers want reform of the Leaving Cert, but not measures that will damage the integrity of a reputable exam. They are not opposed to additional assessments: the majority of the current Leaving Cert subjects have some form of project work or practical as it stands. But they are opposed to the amount of marks given to the proposed new non-exam assessments and aware that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)'s potential has exploded in the past three years.
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It is crazy that senior cycle reform implementation measures are only being produced now, three years after the reform was announced and 18 months after the roll-out was accelerated.
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Why is an AI taskforce meeting for the first time in September 2025, when former minister Foley declared that comprehensive AI guidelines were imminent in April 2024? The UK's Joint Council for Qualifications has had a
30 page document of AI guidelines since 2023
and updated it again last month.
Why is a taskforce on teacher workload only commencing at the same time? Why are additional middle management roles only being offered mere months before new and revised courses begin? Why are teachers not being listened to?
The document setting out all of this is littered with references to collaboration and partnership with teachers.
The science teachers' experience is instructive. The Irish Science Teachers' Association (ISTA) engaged enthusiastically with reform, not least because science subjects have not been revised for more than 20 years. ISTA conducted detailed consultations. The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) would not agree to circulate the 200-page, meticulously detailed document ISTA produced to the science subject development group. NCCA would not circulate anybody's full feedback, only summaries.
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The additional assessment was presented as a fait accompli. Every student would have to carry out an individual research investigation and fill out a pro forma booklet about it.
ISTA's members, principals, and unions protested that existing lab facilities and equipment were completely inadequate. Deis schools will suffer the most, yet again.
Health and safety guidelines for school labs produced in 1996 and briefly updated in 2001 never envisaged tens of thousands of students conducting individual investigations. Accidents and harm to students are almost inevitable.
GenAI can produce a credible investigation within minutes. Teachers are supposed to prevent that in the absence of reliable fraud detection software.
Eventually, every body that represented teachers in the science subject development group, that is, ISTA, ASTI and the Irish University Association, dissociated themselves from the additional assessment. The juggernaut trundled on.
ISTA begged to meet the Department of Education, which only happened last month. ISTA proposed a compromise solution: science teachers would implement the revised courses as they felt enough of their constructive criticism had been incorporated. However, the additional assessments should be paused for a year, that is, back to the original timeline, to produce robust AI usage guidelines and allow schools to upgrade facilities.
Even the companies that supply chemicals and equipment are adamant that they cannot fill orders for vastly increased school needs.
ISTA thought it was still negotiating a sane, simple solution, but a promised second meeting never happened. Instead,
a document
setting out complete compliance with every aspect of senior cycle reform emerged.
This is treating your workforce with contempt. Unions are now in an impossible situation. They know their only effective negotiating tactic is an ongoing strike, but who has the stomach (or finances) for that?
The nightmare result is a no to reform and a no to industrial action, leaving unions hamstrung. Worse will be a demoralised workforce voting yes to reform because they feel unheard and helpless, aware that both students and Ireland's educational reputation will suffer.
Meanwhile,
New York magazine
published an exposé of AI cheating in US universities. Among many others, it featured a cynical individual, Chungin 'Roy' Lee, who cheated on every assessment at Columbia University using AI.
Unethical use of AI is rampant and in danger of producing students whose degrees are essentially meaningless. Lee is now developing an AI called Cluely that can provide answers to on-screen questions without prompting, thereby rendering every third-level online assessment redundant.
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AI tools can create diagrams and videos, replicate handwriting, reproduce individual writing styles, and do so at speed.
The original senior cycle reform proposals were called
Equity and Excellence For All
. Instead, teachers are being bullied into accepting reforms that will deepen inequity, threaten excellence and accelerate the exodus out of teaching.