Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 28 September 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills

Leaving Certificate Reform: Discussion with School Management Bodies

Mr. Paul Crone:

This reform of the senior cycle is huge. It has been going on for a long time and it is not something we are going be able to rush. Best practice would tell us we are not going to be able to rush it and we should not rush it because there are an awful lot of bits and pieces that need to be in place, including supports, training and all those types of things. We have learned from the embedding of the junior cycle. It is done over a number of years.

The answer to supporting the current students who will do the leaving certificate in 2022 is in how we managed over the past two years. We need to look at how we managed through the calculated grades and the accredited grades to put some sort of a holding pattern in place, to be fair to these students, before we can land the jumbo that is senior cycle reform, which is going to be embedded over the next number of years. It would just not be fair to those students to return to a 100% pre-pandemic leaving certificate and say, "There you go, lads; go in and do your exam." To be fair to the students, we need to look to the learning of the past two years for a holding pattern rather than try to rush this senior cycle jumbo to the ground.

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