Common level is not universal design

Almost 74,000 students received their Junior Cycle results on Wednesday morning. A record year: 73,879 candidates, up from 73,336 in 2025, and 651,123 grades issued across 21 subjects. Across all subjects, Distinctions held steady at 8.6 per cent and Higher Merits barely moved, from 30.4 to 30.2 per cent. If you read only that paragraph you would conclude that nothing much happened, which is roughly what a results day is built to make you conclude.

Then you look at French.

What happened in French

Distinctions rose to 9.8 per cent, up from 8 per cent. That is a real improvement and the students who earned it earned it. But in the same subject, in the same sitting, the proportion not graded rose from 0.9 to 1.4 per cent. Partially Achieved rose from 10.5 to 11.5 per cent. Achieved rose from 23.6 to 25.1 per cent. The top got bigger and the bottom got bigger at the same time. The middle thinned out.

A teacher, Elizabeth Lyne, told The Irish Times the exam was “an absolute horror show”, and then said the thing I have been trying to say in staff rooms for years: “The current Common level paper discriminates against the weaker student.”

The difference one word is hiding

“Common level” sounds like fairness, and I want to be fair to it in return. One paper, no streaming, no higher and ordinary, nobody sorted into a tier at thirteen and carried there for three years. I understand why that was wanted and I do not think the people who wanted it were wrong. Streaming does real damage. The decision to stop sorting children before they have finished growing is one I would defend in any room.

But common level and universal design are two different things, and the gap between them is exactly where children fall.

A common-level paper gives every student the same thing. A universally designed paper gives every student a way in. The first is about what goes in. The second is about what comes out. You can do the first perfectly and fail the second completely — and the French figures are what that failure looks like once it reaches a table.

Why one paper pulls in two directions

Think about what a single paper has to do when it is the only paper. It has to be demanding enough at the top that a strong student can show the full range of what they can do, and accessible enough at the bottom that a struggling student can show the full range of what they can do. Those are not naturally the same document.

If you build it by taking the old higher paper and softening it, or by taking the old ordinary paper and bolting a hard section onto the end, you have not designed one paper for everybody. You have stapled two papers together and asked every child to walk through both. The student who would have done well on an ordinary paper meets the top end and stops. The student who would have flown on a higher paper meets the bottom end and coasts.

And in a language subject the barriers are not evenly distributed. So much of the assessment is reading long passages under time pressure and producing written output in a second language. That lands hardest on students who process text more slowly, who have a reading difficulty, who are effectively translating twice, who have the French but not the stamina for the format. That is not a weakness in those students. It is a property of the paper.

What universal design would do instead

Universal design does not mean an easier paper. I want to say that plainly, because it is the objection I hear most often and it is the one that ends the conversation before it starts. It means building the assessment so that the thing being measured is French — and not reading speed, not handwriting stamina, not working memory under time pressure, not the ability to decode a question stem written for somebody else.

In practice it looks like this. More than one route to demonstrating the same competence. Questions that can be met through audio as readily as print, without that being a special arrangement anyone has to apply for. Shorter task units, so that a student who runs out of processing capacity loses a mark rather than a whole section. Question language that is consistent and clean. Genuine choice designed in from the start rather than offered to the few who can produce a report.

That last point is the one that matters most. Reasonable accommodations are necessary, and I will defend them all day and twice on a Tuesday. But a system that leans on them is a system that has quietly decided its default will not work, and has then asked each family to prove that their child is an exception to a rule it already knows is wrong.

Inclusion by presence is not inclusion

This is the sentence I keep coming back to. Putting every student in front of the same paper is presence. It looks like equality. It photographs well. It removes the visible act of sorting, and that visible act was genuinely harmful, so removing it felt like progress.

But if the paper itself does the sorting — quietly, inside the hour, with nobody’s signature on it — then we have not stopped streaming. We have moved it somewhere no one has to take responsibility for it. The student who opens an envelope and finds Partially Achieved is not told that the instrument was built in a way that made it harder for them to show what they actually knew. They are simply told what they got. And at thirteen, the conclusion you draw from that is not about assessment design. It is about yourself.

What I would do with this

If you are a parent and your child’s French grade came in below what their classwork and their teacher led you to expect, that gap may not be about effort. It may be about the design of the instrument. It is worth saying that out loud to them this week, because a thirteen-year-old does not have the information to work it out alone, and the story they tell themselves in the absence of it is a worse story than the truth.

If you are a teacher or a school leader, these figures are usable. A distribution that widens at both ends, in one subject, from one year to the next, is a design signal and not a standards signal. It belongs in curriculum feedback in exactly those words, with the numbers attached.

And if you are anywhere near the people who build these papers, the data has already told you. In the same subject, in the same year, 9.8 per cent and 1.4 per cent both went up. That is one paper pulling in two directions at once, and the children in the middle of it are the ones holding the rope.

Change the environment, not the child.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.