THE PRESS MONDAY, JANUARY 5, 1987. Wages and education

Press, 5 January 1987, Page 16

THE PRESS MONDAY, JANUARY 5, 1987. Wages and education

The “discovery” by trade union officials that the abolition of the University Entrance examination will mean lower wages for thousands of school-leavers is no revelation. Many awards and industrial agreements provided for additional payment of junior employees who had passed the University Entrance examination. Now that the internally-assessed Sixth Form Certificate has replaced University Entrance, the extra pay is not mandatory, and employers in several industries have said the new certificate will not be an acceptable substitute that will warrant payment of the allowances. This much was foreseen years ago, when the Post Primary Teachers’ Association, for reasons of its own, began to campaign for the abolition of the University Entrance examination. The warning, like other reservations about the abolition of the examination, was brushed aside. The time for the union movement to have expressed its concern was before the Minister of Education, Mr Marshall, authorised the change; though it is doubtful that their submissions would have been any more successful in retaining the examination than the pleadings or arguments of the many parents, taxpayers, and employers who saw grave objections to the change. The University Entrance examination had been used widely as a measure of achievement in many walks of life outside the universities. Its abolition, so simply achieved, was not matched by the more difficult but necessary persuasion of pupiis, parents, employers, and taxpayers that academic standards would not decline. The reality of the labour market, as instanced by the union leaders, is that the new certificate does not adequately replace University Entrance. Employers are sceptical that possession of a Sixth Form Certificate is a guarantee of the same standard of education that a University Entrance certificate purported to warrant. The Post Primary Teachers’ Association was the main spur for abolition of the

examination and chief advocate of internal assessment. The association found a sympathetic champion in Mr Marshall, who is now redeploying the argument of “not sending pupils out from school with a sense of -failure” against the School Certificate examination.

Not everyone can be a winner all the time, except, it seems, in Mr Marshall’s education system. Unfortunately for the educational theorists, schooling does not exist as an entity to itself, but is part of the world. The success of the education system, in terms of the pupils it produces, is not measured solely by ; unbruised egos, but also by the usefulness of its graduates in the work-force and the community at large. More and more employers already are putting job applicants through some form of testing closely attuned to the particular job. Without the base reference of universal examinations such as University Entrance or School Certificate, employers wanting to confirm that applicants have a command of elementary literacy and numeracy will be forced to more extensive examination of prospective employees. Such a regime, conducted outside the education system and to a wide variety of standards, will be more unfair than any of the perceived inequities of the old examinations. In the meantime it seems that a substantial number of employers, no less disenchanted with the standard of education than many parents, are not prepared to take the Sixth Form Certificate as an indication of much more than satisfactory attendance at classes. That thousands of school-leavers will be restricted to a lower level of pay than they might otherwise have aspired to is a direct consequence of depriving them of the opportunity of sitting an examination and passing it if they were good enough. Were the option still available, Mr Marshall and the Post Primary Teachers’ Association might have been surprised at the number willing to run the risk of “failure” for the chance of success and the higher rewards it would have brought.