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

I have already said why the short courses are not compulsory. It was felt that this was too much to ask at the present time, so we have made it voluntary, through nobody's fault. The Haddington Road agreement concerned public sector pay, in the main, and had nothing as such to do with education. One particular union found itself in a position in which it was reconsidering its attitude to the agreement, which put everything else on hold. Therefore, time was lost in that regard.

Senator Power talked about the very slow implementation of what we are doing. I will not repeat the other concerns she expressed. The Senator has consistently indicated her support for the steps we are taking.

It seems to me - this would be true for a number of people - that there are concerns around two issues: first, the system of assessment and its validation and objectivity; and second, catching something over three years of a child's education, from 12 to 16 years of age, as distinct from the once-off leaving certificate examination, as Senator Moloney mentioned, and at the same time being objective in how we do so. It is happening all around the world and it is happening in many other parts of our education system. There is enough for us to learn from and take the best practice. We will engage with the teachers' unions if they wish to get involved with us, and I hope they will consider doing so.

Senator Moloney made an observation about her son, who has spent 11 years in the education system studying medicine. On reflection, she thought the leaving certificate was the hardest exam of them all. There are issues, which Deputy Ó Ríordáin talked about. There will be knock-on changes to the leaving certificate as a result of two pressures. The first is changes that we have asked for regarding the universities. The CAO system will now have ten points of gradation instead of 14. Also, the marking system, whereby one can be 2.5 percentage points away from going up or down by 5 points, will change. We also hope that the third level institutions will reduce their bewildering number of level 8 courses. There are now more than 1,100 such courses on offer, which is bewildering. Ten years ago there were fewer than 500.

We commissioned research from the Oxford University research centre regarding the unacceptable predictability of certain questions in exams, which turned out to be less of a problem than we had originally thought. Oxford University is a near neighbour of ours and is on the other island, but it could not get over the amount of media coverage that surrounds the leaving certificate examination and the junior certificate examination, and the consequent pressure that puts on families. As many as 60,000 young people sit the leaving certificate examination, but about 0.5 million people sit the exam in this country when we include their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, etc.