Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin North Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I was in one of the first cohorts to do the junior certificate in 1992 and I got an A in honours Irish. It was the only A I ever got, so I thought I would throw it out there as my biggest achievement in life. To echo what has been said already, people always state they want change and reform, but when it comes, they can be uncomfortable with it. I very much welcome the changes. The main concern is coming from those we hope to empower to implement this change, who are the teachers. Their main question mark is over the balance between being adjudicators and advocates for their students and how this balance might be shifted. I accept the point that we ask teachers to assess their own students in first year, second year and fifth year, and now we hope to do it in third year and we do not want 15 year olds to go into the workplace. How do we strike the balance between advocacy and assessment?

I assume that over the course of time we want to change the leaving certificate. A problem at junior certificate is that 54,000 students do history at junior certificate level but only 11,000 do it at leaving certificate level whereas 54,000 students do honours geography at junior certificate level and 23,000 do it at leaving certificate level. There is a problem with students not continuing with certain subjects to leaving certificate. Is there a learning curve in this implementation as to how we might address the problem of the leaving certificate in the long term?