Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate my colleagues facilitating me. It is hard to know where to start every week because all of us feel quite strongly about this matter. As has been said, if the odds are stacked against the poorer students, one would feel like setting fire to the whole thing immediately. Who wants it to stay as it is? We cannot find anybody willing to come in front of the committee to tell us that this should remain absolutely unchanged, so I am trying to think who would such people be. The grinds schools want the system to remain absolutely as it is because there is money to be made. There are the schools that like to present themselves as being academically superior and high on school league tables. There is an appalling journalistic insistence on throwing out completely untested data on schools; even the Department of Education does not like it and will not produce it under freedom of information. So who is the system benefiting?

I am interested in what the witnesses said about teacher involvement and how it is more usual across Europe. A number of years ago, we tried to change the junior certificate and there was massive resistance. There was the use of terms like "banning history". The leaving certificate does not just strangle young people; it also strangles subjects, as people who care about history might know. My understanding is 54,000 students every year do junior certificate geography and history, 23,000 do leaving certificate geography but only 11,000 do leaving certificate history. That is because students are afraid of the exam because it is a heavy and arduous written exam.

How do we get from where we are to what we want to achieve? In all this, there is a scenario of certain schools not offering certain subjects at certain levels. I gave statistics last week indicating there are 31 schools in the Republic of Ireland where no student does higher-level Irish for the leaving certificate and 39 schools where no student does higher level maths. I may have my subjects mixed up but there are approximately 30 or 40 schools at second level where not a single student does honours or higher-level English, Irish or maths. The process is stacked against poorer students.

With the assessed grades system over the past two years, we have learned that we can have proactive teacher involvement in assessment, with agreement. It was not perfect and it was done as a firefighting measure because of the pandemic but surely within it there is potential for changing our mindset. How do we learn from what has happened over the past two years and how do we make a difference now? The witnesses are absolutely right in saying there is an intergenerational attachment to the exam because anybody from middle Ireland who has successfully negotiated second and third level feel there is nothing wrong because it was fine for them. They want their children to be protected by the system that was successful for them. If people have not been successful through it, they will not have as strong a voice.

How do we learn from the past two years and the matters raised by the assessed grades model, imperfect and all as it is? Is this our one opportunity? If we miss it, we may be another 20 or 30 years before we have this discussion again.