English as a subject in Ireland
At the end of the school year, and at a time when the future shape of our subject is becoming clearer, like a camera lens adjusting focus, it is worth taking stock before we head off to the beach.
We have also recently had a draft specification for the reformed Leaving Certificate, consultation events around that, a revised Transition Year Programme Statement with implications for English, and the annual drama of the public examinations, including a controversy about the Higher Level Junior Cycle paper, which crystallized many teachers’ feelings about that course, not to mention a development North of the border which seems more coherent and sensible than the curriculum reform we have become used to down here.
First of all I should say that there is far too little intellectual underpinning for our subject here (take it as written from now on that this is the case for other subjects too). A rare example was the 2023 publication Perspectives on the Teaching of English in Post-Primary Education, edited by Kevin Cahill and Niamh Dennehy, which I wrote about here:
(This) is a multi-perspective volume written by 15 people in 16 chapters and an introduction, a genuine breadth which is turned into part of its strength. Many academic tones like this never escape from the straitjacket of deadening third-level jargon; they tend to float grandly well over the realities of classroom practice. But here we have a good number of practitioners from Ireland’s second-level classrooms, as well as academics.
Nothing I have read from ‘official’ sources such as government/Department of Education quangos, has had a worthwhile value at such a level. Official documents in deadened prose too often promote dubious ideas like ‘learning outcomes’, and inspection reports show too little understanding of what makes our subject special, and frequently incorporate received, contestable and unevidenced ideas about classroom practice.
As always, classroom practitioners are the best people to read and listen to: Conor Murphy has been ploughing this furrow for some time with eloquence on his blog the Video Trolley. I hope I have contributed here, too. Former English teacher Breda O’Brien has written trenchantly in her Irish Times column. But teachers are extremely busy, and sometimes all they can do is express themselves online in the short form of social media, particularly on Facebook and X/Twitter, and these expressions tend to be ones borne out of frustration. A shout-out to the extraordinary array of brilliant thinking that has been on show in the four English Meets I have organised at my school in recent years. The graphic below shows the wide range of topics we have addressed. Sarah Kelly has done similar wonderful facilitation at Bandon Grammar School. Nothing I have experienced in official training has reached that level of excellence. I should add that INOTE, our subject association, is always on the ball, such as in this recent statement about a Junior Cycle exam (scroll down through the thread).
Summary of English Meet topics at St Columba’s College
All this matters. It matters that at times of change (let’s assume that education should constantly evolve), curricular evolution should be slow and based on the fundamental principles of the subject. This has not been the case recently, with a Ministerial determination to speed through changes too fast, and an intellectual poverty behind these. We should pay heed to Neil Postman’s thermostatic principle, as described by Thomas Newkirk in his book The Art of Slow Reading:
Schools, Postman argues, should act on a thermostatic principle: a thermostat acts to cool when a room is too hot, to heat when too cool. Schools should act to check (and not imitate) some tendencies in the wider information environment: “The major role of education in the years immediately ahead is to help conserve that which is necessary to a humane survival and threatened by a furious and exhausting culture.”
Now follow comments on the three levels of the subject in secondary school in Ireland.
The Junior Cycle
There is no greater disconnect in the system at the moment than between the official angle on this programme and what the feelings of teachers are. Officially, it has been a great success. But teachers, while acknowledging some positive elements of the course, are almost uniformly dismayed by the nature of the assessment: mostly of the 2-hour examination (down from a total of 5 hours in the Junior Certificate at Higher Level), and to some extent of the CBA process. The Junior Cycle across the board has dismayingly little credibility in schools, and already after a mere 10 years looks tired and frayed. But it supposed to be an inspirational springboard to the final school years.
In the most recent English exam, there were many complaints about inclusion of a short story at Higher Level. The defensive response from the SEC correctly stated that this was on the syllabus, but overwhelmingly the response of teachers was that the exam was designed to ‘catch out’ both candidates and teachers, rather than allowing the former to show what they have learned. The assessment has been badly designed: an extremely wide-ranging course cannot be properly covered in the time allocated, and the terminal assessment, as so often happens, washes back into the teaching of the subject. This relatively minor ruckus over a small element of one exam was a case-study in the lack of credibility of the course.
Many people have pointed out another disconnect: between the current Junior and Senior Cycles. This is undoubtedly true: a steadily thinning-out JC is going backwards, further away from a Leaving Certificate which at Higher Level is - for the moment - intellectually demanding. But the defining cognitive bias in Irish education, especially in officialdom which never-ever admits error, is sunk cost fallacy:
the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.
The logical way to fix the disconnect is to sort out the Junior Cycle and make it more appropriate as a foundation for the Leaving Certificate. But that would mean acknowledging the problem, being open about it, and then addressing it.
That problem is devastatingly skewered in this recent piece by Conor Murphy: the sort of practical detail only a current teacher could produce:
Unfortunately, the SEC only sees value in knowing information, not in using information to articulate our thoughts, feelings, reactions, hopes, imaginations, connections, and all the other topics we wished we could encourage our students to write about. The new Junior Cycle English Specification, as filtered through the SEC exam, is now just another STEM subject.
Transition Year
The TY, which has recently garnered international praise from sources such as the Guardian and the Financial Times, feels forgotten. A new Programme Statement to come into operation from September 2025 has had hardly any attention, squeezed out of educational discourse by Leaving Certificate controversies. But it includes the startling statement about English, Maths and Irish that
The class time allocation for each of these subjects should not exceed two hours per week.
This just a small number of years after the two big School Self-Evaluation priorities were literacy and numeracy!
The next sentence tries to suggest ways effectively round this:
A school can build on the learning associated with these subjects through additional TY components or other areas of learning, within the parameters of the TY Programme Statement.
This is unhelpful and even dishonest: the straightforward thing would be simply to allocate an appropriate and adequate amount of time for each of these subjects.
Leaving Certificate
I have written extensively about reform on several occasions, including on the original interim plan for English and Irish, thankfully abandoned, and am not going to rehash those arguments now. The most relevant recent piece is on the draft specification for the new course; since then the introduction of the course has been delayed by at least one year due to the plainly immense administrative demands of the Fifth Year oral Additional Assessment Component (decent concept, wrong time to do it).
English reform has been built on two erroneous ideas - firstly, that our course and our teaching have been subject to that pejorative term ‘rote learning’, a canard which I deal with here, and secondly that spreading assessment across time will result in a reduction of stress. The fatal flaw in the latter argument is that the end point of all assessments in the Leaving Certificate years is a high-stakes third-level-qualifying exam. As Breda O’Brien writes in today’s Irish Times,
If submission deadlines move back into fifth year, or even if they are packed into sixth year, the result will be chronic stress with little respite, exactly the opposite of the planned outcome.
Finally
Paul Givan and Lucy Crehan
Earlier this week, the international education expert Lucy Crehan, author of Cleverlands: The Secrets Behind the Success of the World’s Education Superpowers, delivered her Review of the Northern Ireland Curriculum. It is obviously not within the remit of this piece to consider English in Northern Ireland, but it should be said that the commissioning of this review by Minister Paul Givan was admirably open-minded and forward-looking, and it is difficult to imagine a similar process in the Republic; our authorities are consistently defensive. Lucy Crehan’s report points the way to a more coherent flow of education in the North, and her words should be absorbed down here:
Effective curriculum implementation will require protected time and considerable professional development. Teachers need time to familiarise themselves with new resources, understand their underlying rationale and consider how they relate to each other and their pupils as part of designing each unique school curriculum.
The new curriculum must be kept under review to keep pace with evolving knowledge, technology and societal needs. A six-year curriculum review cycle, staggered on an Area of Learning basis, should be adopted. Not every cycle would entail statutory changes – some might lead to updated resources or professional learning but having a predictable schedule would ensure regular refresh and support trust and manageability.
Instead, in the Republic of Ireland the ‘flow’ of English from a patchy and flawed Junior Cycle, through a forcibly-reduced Transition Year, to an ill-conceived reformed Leaving Certificate, makes me think of the old joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. The lack of deep and sympathetic thinking about English from people who know and care about the subject seems dismayingly bound to deliver a thinned-down and reduced subject in the coming years. And I haven’t even addressed the disturbing challenges of Artificial Intelligence, which are already a cause of considerable stress to teachers.
In the end our subject should be about joy - in studying literature, in composing, in reading - and the poor reshaping of the curriculum means that it will be harder to elicit that joy in the future. In the next couple of years I will leave the classroom, and am saddened that colleagues nationally who continue the good fight will have to swim against the tide.
Also published on Substack on June 9th 2025: