Dr. Harold Hislop:

We have done reports on some aspects of those. We have done general reports on arts education. Now that we have put in place the systems for collecting the quality data that we have for literacy, numeracy and Irish, we will publish on the other subjects in more detail as well. We intend to have both good practice guides and reports on the standards in the other subjects. There simply was not room in the chief inspector's report this time to do it.

Senator O’Donnell referred also to the weakness with regard to assessment. We point to the weakness of assessment. We have seen a lot of evidence right the way across teachers’ practice. The weakest area of teachers’ practice is assessment. That arises for a number of reasons, partly because it has not been an issue that has been treated in a great deal of depth in the initial teacher education to date. More recently, it has become a more important part of the teacher education programmes. The Teaching Council has been overseeing the implementation of those in the colleges of education and in university education departments, but it has not been a major aspect of the courses. While teachers have used standardised and other tests that have been made available to them, we see them getting little or limited information to inform their teaching. They administer the tests and record test results but there has not been a systematic practice of examining the assessment data as to what that means for the way they should change teaching and learning. That is what we are trying to get them to do in the self-evaluation process. If particular aspects of the teaching of a subject - for example, the elements of art - are not coming across strongly when they look at children’s work, if there is not progression in art - we would say that there is not-----