Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

As the Minister, Deputy Richard Bruton, stated, we have supplied the committee with a submission and I understand copies of my formal remarks have been circulated already. With the agreement of the Chairman and the committee, therefore, I propose to speak on the salient points to provide for more time for questions and answers.

I will begin by introducing my two colleagues. Ms Anne Forde from the higher education policy and skills section has responsibility for the ICT action plan, and Ms Breda Naughton is responsible for the national literacy and numeracy strategy and for the new framework for junior cycle reform.

Both the Minister, Deputy Bruton, and myself have been listening to the requirements from both employers in the Irish small and medium enterprise sector as well as from the multinationals. Representatives of multinationals are limited in what they can say because there is their own head office and sometimes they concentrate much of what they say on the education system. I offer that as an observation; members can use it as they choose. Listening to the employers, one would think that instant solutions could be found through the university system, but the path to third level education starts in kindergarten and in junior cycle. That is the reason I want to address the question of reform of the education system.

My colleague the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald, is not present, but she would talk about the critical importance of preschool education for young people aged from three to six years of age or certainly up to six years of age. This country got a wake-up call in the autumn of 2009 - some members were on the education committee at the time - when we dropped from fifth place to 17th place in the PISA ranking of literacy, and there was a proportionate fall in regard to science. Everybody - including, I am happy to say, the then Minister and officials in the Department of Education and Science - said this was a problem. The scale of the drop probably overshot the reality on the ground but nevertheless it galvanised us to respond.

In terms of what we have done in the areas of literacy and numeracy - if we are talking about IT skills, these are the core building blocks - we have been complacent here for decades about the excellence of our education system, which we constantly asserted without reference by comparative means to other systems, although there is a long history to that. We have changed the curriculum within the Department for primary school education in terms of the allocation of time to ensure that more time is made available for literacy and numeracy. At the same time we have introduced and formalised a system of assessment which was already in place but is now standardised. We benchmark, assess and measure at the end of second class, fourth class and sixth class, and from the autumn of 2014 we will be doing that at the end of second year in the junior cycle. I will come back to that later.

We are putting a great deal of resources into getting continual professional development for teachers in this area. We have announced the change - it will take time for it to occur - in the configuration of the provision of initial teacher education in Ireland. Singapore, with a population of 5 million, has one college that deals with both primary and secondary school. Finland, the poster child of education, has eight such colleges and Ontario in Canada has 13. This lovely little country of ours has 19. The international expert group which the Higher Education Authority brought into operation surveyed the situation and has recommended changing the configuration of those 19 colleges into new clusters or amalgamations of six. In addition to that, the three-year course in education for primary school teachers will be extended to four years. Many of the additional quasi-academic, first-start degree-type qualifications, which had little or no relevance to the teaching of primary school children, are being stripped out and the focus is exclusively on pedagogic skills.

When somebody did an arts, science or commerce degree but always intended to go into second level education, he or she would do a H.Dip. The H.Dip qualifications varied in quality and value because the college was only one partner in the provision of the course, the other partner being the school to which the student was assigned. In some cases there was a looped cycle in which a student would leave school, go to college, do the H.Dip, come back to do his or her work experience during the H.Dip and, when he or she qualified, stay in that school. The life experience of such students was therefore somewhat limited, and that is the case across the country. That will now be a two-year cycle, as distinct from a one-year cycle, and it will be much more rigorously invigilated and examined, with the emphasis on teaching skills.

On the reason for the emphasis on teaching skills, every piece of international evidence demonstrates, regardless of the ideological starting point, that good teachers produce great results. Good teachers trump all other advantages or disadvantages. Having the most IT-powered school or a pupil-teacher ratio of 1:5 is of no use if a teacher is bad. It rests on the quality of the teachers, and in that regard we are very fortunate in this country.

I was in Brussels yesterday, where they were moaning about the need to attract people into the teaching profession, to pay them more to stay longer in school, etc. Currently, we have a nine-to-one application rate for primary teaching college places. Hibernia College has a strong demand for conversion courses from people in their mid- to late 20s. There are major structural changes in literacy and numeracy in education. Some of them we will see quickly; it will take time for others to be embedded, but we have to start the journey.

People have been talking about reforming the junior cycle for about ten years.