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

We are here nearly two hours. I am more than happy because I am learning all the time from what is being said. I am at the disposal of the committee and it is up to the Chair to decide. There is no reluctance on my part in that regard, as members will have seen over the past couple of years.
I have heard very clearly what Deputy O'Brien has said and I recognise that he is reporting accurately what he has heard. I respect that. One of the great strengths of our education system is the level of engagement that parents have directly with schools and with the teachers in those schools and the sense of trust that teachers have in parents and vice versa. I would be loth to put this at risk and therefore I am concerned.
Unfortunately, the fact that the Haddington Road agreement was a public sector pay deal for 300,000 public sector workers, including Deputies and Senators, got in the way of an attempt to get these things going. If we had attempted to keep talking, we would have run into a serious problem with the teaching profession or one of the unions in the teaching profession specifically because the other union in the post-primary sector had made a decision in relation to the Haddington Road agreement.
From the point of view of the parents, every subject the young person who takes first year classes next September does for the junior certificate in three years time will be the same with one exception, namely, English. The curriculum for English by and large is a bit more specific than it is currently but it is essentially the same. The exam they will sit in June 2017 will be set by the State Examinations Commissions and will be corrected and marked by the commission. The maximum marks they can get from that will be 60%.

Where we do not have agreement is on how the project work that makes up the assessment will be done. All of us make presentations - we do it as politicians. In any working environment there are presentations and collaboration. Any of our children could be great at group working, and researching for and making a presentation of a project. None of those attributes, which are essential for a maturing young person, are captured by our present examination system. We are trying to find a system that will do that. I will explore it with people. There are professional educators on either side of me here who know far more than I will ever know about these things. We are open to trying to capture what the modern 21st century young person's set of skill requirements is and how we assess that.

There is a proposal with the Teaching Council. We require our primary schoolteachers to have a higher-level qualification in Gaeilge but not in mathematics. The statistics from the State Examinations Commission that I was quoting show that 14 and 15-year old girls do higher level maths for the junior certificate examinations and then drop down to ordinary-level maths for the leaving certificate if they intend going to teacher training college because that is all that is required. Young people are very smart at navigating the mountain that is the leaving certificate. They will take the softest route. That is one of the reasons that agricultural science, for example, is a very popular subject in the midst of urban areas where nobody has ever been on a farm. It is because it is an easy subject to get high marks in the leaving certificate.

I was making the point that girls who have demonstrated the ability that they are well capable of doing higher-level maths and do it in the junior certificate, wanting to become schoolteachers decide to maximise their points - that may change with the with the incentivised extra 25 points now-----