Ms Brigid McManus:

Yes. We deal largely with students in the moderate range, who are either in special units in schools or in special schools. The website has videos showing examples of students doing pieces of work. I believe the modules are due to be rolled out in 2016, although I will have to check that, but they are finalised and have been approved by council. They will be built on as well.

On arts, music and education, one of the criticisms made in my time as Secretary General was that, while music was quite strong in primary schools and primary school teachers had strong training in music, other forms of art were not so. I agree about Sister Bernadette in St. Agnes's primary school. Many years ago I was at a concert there. Her work is phenomenal and feeds back into other things. She had great persuasive powers and the number of people she managed to involve in the project was amazing.

There is an issue with resources. I was involved in the music and education project that had matched funding, one of the advantages of which was that we were able to roll out some of the pilot projects. A lot of work was done in trying to roll out the County Donegal pilot on instrumental music in individual classes. The NCCA and the Department are working on a programme on arts and education and a new website has gone live to support teachers and students. It is very important. One of the key skills in constructing the junior cycle programme is related to appreciation of the arts. One of the short courses we have developed as part of the junior cycle is on arts and performance, and it is innovative because the assessment is around a performance piece rather than a more traditional piece. This will not be without challenges as we roll it out.

Deputy Conaghan asked about the challenges in assessment. There is always a balance in the education system, and one of the strengths of the Irish system is that, unlike some places, we have not gone into every fad, so we did not have to change every year and introduce new things while we were still in the process of rolling out the previous things. One of the difficulties of the Irish commitment to the education system is a fear of change, though I would not accept that our system has stayed static, as we have made a lot of changes, such as the 1999 curriculum, the revised junior cycle and transition year. However, one of the things we learned from the earlier reforms is that if one does not change the assessment system, particularly at second level, teachers will go back to the default of what the exam examines, no matter how wonderful the curriculum.

People will teach what the exam demands as students progress through second level. It is a real challenge to try to come up with different approaches to assessment, both in terms of the State Examination Commission's assessment and in the wider assessment of learning.

In response to Senator Healy Eames's question about what we hope will be better about the junior cycle, we want assessments to be conversations between teachers and student about what the student is trying to achieve in his or her learning and how one would know something is a good piece of work rather than about the marketing scheme and how a student would get another point. In the junior cycle we are trying to get the focus more on the outputs rather than the inputs. The debate has often been around the choice of subjects but focusing on the key skills and that a school should design a curriculum around needs is about trying to state, the skills and dispositions people will have acquired at the end of the cycle. One needs to ensure that through the combination of subjects, the learning and the non-curricular learning they are doing, they are coming out at the end with that kind of output as opposed to always worrying what we are feeding in, whether we are doing enough of "x" or so many hours of "y". That is probably the big change.

I do not want to comment on where we are at now, given that the union members will vote on it in the autumn. We have done much work to date and the agreement that is on the table, with new reporting structures and parental engagement - trying to move the system in the direction of conversations among professionals in school, professionals across schools, between parents and teachers and between students and parents about how we know the student - has improved student learnings. Culture change in any organisation is a major challenge. Everybody present has been involved in different organisations, getting cultural change is very difficult. It will take time. If this were to be adopted in schools, we would not wake up on the following morning with everything different but it provides a significant opportunity in spite of all the difficulties around it. Despite all our differences, with different partners who sit around the table at council, the people involved have a passion for education and for making a difference for students. That is a big strength.

In respect of the reform of the senior cycle, we are doing things that are designed to use best practice, for example our new science curriculum, Project Maths or the ongoing updating of the curriculum, but the issue in the medium term is the type of senior cycle we want for students and whether that has changed since we first designed the senior cycle. The trends in Finland and other countries is for more individual and personalised learning. For the students over 16 years who wish to pursue a vocational curriculum, we have to consider how to manage that choice with issues such as the leaving certificate applied. We have not looked at the applied leaving certificate for some time. Issues in other countries arise on how to design the school system, whether to have middle schools and then at the upper school level, there are different types of schools. There is a number of significant questions on how one structures the senior cycle. Our work on transition has focused very much on higher education, but we must work on how apprenticeships fits with the further education sector. In other words we must consider how transition year will fit in with the junior cycle and senior cycle when charges are made to the junior cycle programme. The issue in the shorter term is ensuring the subject choice structure and the work we are doing in transition year will take some of the pressure off second level and trying to get a different marking scheme. All of the initiatives should change the experience at second level but on the issue the Senator raised about forecasting for 25 years forward and the skills that people will need when they finish their leaving certificate in 25 years time, we have to consider what we can learn from very different structures and systems elsewhere.