A System That "Works" — For Whoever It Was Built to Measure

Two education stories landed in the same week, and they're worth reading side by side. In the Irish Times today, Newton Emerson makes the case that Northern Ireland is right to follow England back toward a "knowledge-rich," exam-heavy curriculum, while the Republic pushes ahead with a skills-based senior cycle reform. His argument, more or less: traditional teaching works, progressive teaching fails, and the PISA rankings prove it. Three days earlier, in the same paper, ASTI — the union representing secondary teachers — said something quieter but more troubling about that very reform: that the people actually running it don't feel heard. A DCU maths professor resigned from the subject development group, calling the emerging course "incoherent and mathematically inaccurate." The union's general secretary-designate wrote to the Minister and the NCCA about a "disregard" for dissenting views inside the process itself.

I want to be careful here, because "traditional teaching works" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It works for whoever the measurement was built around. A PISA ranking tells you how a system performs against a fairly narrow definition of success — and it tells you nothing about the child who is bright, curious, and completely unable to show what they know inside a three-hour written exam under fluorescent lights with the clock running. Go back further, past this decade's reforms and the last one's, and you find the same shape underneath: an Irish education system that has always sorted children by how well they perform a very particular kind of stillness and recall. We've softened the edges since my own school days — more resource hours, more SNAs, more language about "additional needs" — but softened is not the same as rebuilt. It's the same elitist, unbending architecture with better cushioning.

Which is what makes the ASTI story the more important one of the two, even though it got less attention. However you feel about skills-based reform versus a return to exams, the actual complaint here isn't ideological — it's about whose judgement counts while the decision is being made. Subject experts raising concerns and being overruled. A process that talks about consultation while quietly narrowing what's allowed to be said. If that's happening to secondary maths teachers with decades of subject expertise, it is, I promise you, happening to every parent who has sat across a table from a school team and been told, gently, that their read of their own child isn't the one that's going to shape the plan. It's the same pattern. Inclusion, done properly, isn't just about who's in the room — it's about whether the room actually changes because of who's in it.

There was a lovely phrase doing the rounds last week, in a special edition of Studies timed to the Convention on Education: the difference between inclusion and access. Access is the seat, the enrolment, the place on paper. Inclusion is whether the system bends when it meets a real child, a real teacher, a real dissenting view — whether it's actually built to be changed by the people inside it, or just built to look like it might be. Reading Newton Emerson's column and ASTI's letter in the same week, I don't think Ireland has answered that question yet, whichever way the senior cycle reform eventually lands. A stricter, more traditional model doesn't fix an exclusion problem — it just re-hardens the walls we've spent twenty years trying to put windows in. And a "progressive" reform that won't listen to the teachers delivering it, or the families living with its consequences, isn't actually progressive. It's the same old certainty in a new outfit.

What I'd want instead — for my own kids, for the families I work with, for the teachers doing genuinely hard work inside a system that keeps changing the rules on them mid-year — is much less dramatic than either side of this argument. It's a classroom built from the start to work for more than one kind of learner, designed with enough give in it that no child needs a diagnosis to be believed, and a reform process humble enough to change course when the people closest to the work say something isn't working. That's not radical. It's just inclusion, properly meant, instead of access with better manners.