Mr. Michael Gillespie:

Looking at other jurisdictions, the danger is they come from a different historical investment background and have different emphases on different subjects.

It would be difficult to shoehorn something that is in another jurisdiction into the historical background of how our education system evolved. If I were to pick one thing, taking the average of the EU 22, it would be the country's where the class sizes are 16. Reducing class sizes would be a major move forward in giving us far more flexibility in where we are going to move to in any evolution of senior cycle reform. We should be looking at those jurisdictions that have smaller class sizes.

Every jurisdiction has bits that we would like to say might fit into our system. Some countries do particular subjects better. In my own subject, physics, I know one or two jurisdictions that do that very well, but they do other things quite badly. We need to look at and learn from all of these jurisdictions to see what will fit into the unique system that is the Irish leaving certificate and how we can make it and faith in the Irish education system evolve. Parents and the general population still have strong belief in the Irish education system and they have faith in it despite that, maybe, we are underinvesting in it.