• You are here:
• Home /
• Archived /
• Press Release - Education Case Summaries (Annual Report 1995)

Press Release - Education Case Summaries (Annual Report 1995)

Press Release - Education Case Summaries (Annual Report 1995)

Education - Notes

• Change in procedures for retention of Examination Scripts

A complaint against the Department of Education was received from a woman whose son believed he had been incorrectly awarded too low a grade in a particular subject in the leaving certificate. The Ombudsman is not equipped to conduct independent assessments of exam papers but when he decided to pursue the matter by ensuring that fair and reasonable procedures had been followed in the case, he discovered that the Department had already, in error, destroyed the script. Following the Ombudsman's intervention, the Department agreed to change their procedures so that in future all examination scripts will be retained until 30 November of the examination year and all scripts which have been the subject of appeals will be retained for one year after the result of the appeal has issued or a year after the correspondence has ceased, whichever is later.

• Unfair discrimination

Two cases in the 1995 Annual Report concern the issue of Unfair Discrimination and both of them concern complaints involving the Department of Education.

• A complainant was refused a grant under the Vocational Education Committee (VEC) Scholarship Scheme. A condition of the scheme was that applicants had to have either two honours in the 1992 Leaving Certificate or an equivalent standard from a second level programme of education outside the State. The complainant did not meet this requirement but had, however, completed a third-level course in the UK, obtaining a Higher National Diploma which enabled him to enter a third-level course here. The Department informed the Ombudsman that the complainant's third level Diploma was not acceptable as "equivalent" to two Leaving Certificate honours and that it was not possible to make an exception in this particular case. However an examination of the Department's file showed that the Department had found it possible to make exceptions to this scheme in a number of cases and had done so as recently as January, 1995. The academic qualifications of some of these candidates for whom exceptions had been made were practically the same as that of the complainant.

The Ombudsman was concerned that, in this case, the Department had not exercised the same degree of discretion as in other cases, and that like cases were not treated in like manner. When he put this to the Department, it agreed to pay the grant and full arrears to the complainant.

• The second case of discrimination concerned the Trí Ghaeilge Scholarship Scheme and a complaint from a student who had met all of the qualifications for the scheme in 1993 but had still been refused a grant. The scheme provides for up to twenty third-level scholarships each year for specific courses which must be pursued through Irish at specified colleges. However an examination by the Ombudsman revealed that some of the twenty scholarships available had been awarded to students pursuing courses which were not on the list of approved courses in the published scheme. After lengthy contact with the Department, it agreed to award the student the sum of �3,239 (the value of the scholarship in the academic year 1993/94).

The Ombudsman was concerned with the way the scheme had been administered and pointed out that if a concession is to be given, then as a fundamental principle, that concession must become the rule and apply to everyone.