Mr. Lewis Purser:

Yes, on Senator Healy Eames's question about the leaving certificate, one of the strands of the selection and admissions work that I alluded to earlier is looking at how to reform the leaving certificate assessment practices. We find students coming into third level, and this is not just a university experience but is felt by all third level colleges, have been conditioned by the leaving certificate experience to learning and being assessed in a certain way. A big challenge for higher education is to de-programme them from that experience to ensure they can learn in a different way in higher education.

The purpose of collapsing the leaving certificate grade bans from, say, a C1, C2 and C3 into a new type of C grade would be to allow for a more innovative and much more sensitive assessment practice at leaving certificate where the assessment would be less predictive and the examinations the students sit would be less predictable.

In higher education in the past ten years we have introduced more outcomes-based modern assessment systems which examine students' competences as opposed to their knowledge. Obviously, they need knowledge but what they can do with that knowledge and how they apply it is important. In many cases that is not particularly successfully measured in the leaving certificate as it currently stands.

We do not want to abolish the leaving certificate because there is a huge advantage in having a well-respected, national end of school examination. As a country that is a benefit to us. Other countries do not have that and they have to put in place alternative systems but we would like to see a modernisation of assessment practices at leaving certificate level.