The High Court has rejected a student’s judicial review challenge to changes in the model used to calculate 2020 Leaving Certificate grades, finding he had not established material unfairness or a breach of legitimate expectation. The court directed the parties to make written submissions on costs and other consequential orders within 14 days; it did not decide those matters in this judgment.
The applicant, Freddy Sherry, attended Belvedere College in Dublin. He argued that removing school historical data from the standardisation model and limiting the effect of national historical data had unfairly affected his grades and his prospects of securing a place on his preferred third-level course.
The traditional 2020 Leaving Certificate was cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic and replaced by calculated grades. Teachers estimated students’ marks and ranked them within subject classes. A Department of Education model then standardised those estimates using historical information.
Government decisions in September 2020 removed school historical data from the model and retained national historical data while not applying a national “mapping tool”. The judgment said those changes departed from commitments made to students and contributed to grade inflation. The court also described the decisions as policy choices made amid concern about public confidence in the system.
Sherry’s school estimates were higher than his calculated grades in several subjects. One grade, in Biology, was later raised from H3 to H2 because of a coding error. The court noted that Belvedere’s 2020 estimates for top grades were substantially above its results in the previous three years, and said inflated estimates were common at higher levels across schools.
The judge considered a comparison of two model versions, one retaining a reduced role for school historical data and one removing it. For the six subjects compared, the applicant’s grades were the same under both versions. Latin was not included in that comparison. The court also found that Belvedere maintained its relative position compared with other schools after the calculated grades were awarded.
The court concluded that the applicant had not shown that he or his school suffered unfairness because of the changes. It held that the decisions were exercises of executive policy and were not justiciable by the court. It further concluded that the claim failed on legitimate expectation grounds because material unfairness had not been established and because the public interest supported the changes. The judgment rejected the challenge; it did not order a change to the applicant’s grades.