Dr. Anne Looney:

I echo my colleague's comment regarding the issue of fairness. He is right. What needs to be done regarding protecting the examination has all the trappings of fairness, but it looks very different to learners in Roscommon, for example, than it does to those in Rathmines or Rathgar. It is not only the case because some students might enter the examination halls with some economic advantage, social capital or having had the benefit of grinds, it also involves all the messaging about consequences. Some students have heard messaging about the consequences involved not just in the run-up to examinations, but since they were ten years old. They have heard from their families and communities about what success and successful learning looks like and what kinds of learning we value as a society. Therefore, the examination itself is fair, in its own narrow context, but the situation starts to look very different when we broaden our perspective. To reiterate, it is not only about the messaging that happens on the way into the examination hall, but also the messaging which happens earlier in life.

Moving on to the subject of specific trade-offs, it is a good question about what kind of balance we want to have. We have high retention rates in upper secondary education. Our students stay on until the end of the cycle. This is part of our social imagination, in that we are really committed to education as a country. It is probably our downfall in some ways, because taxi drivers and supermarket workers talk about what poetry questions came up in the leaving certificate examinations. It is a national conversation. We put a high value on education, therefore, but in senior cycle there are opportunities for more vocational education which would mean that we could move towards parity of esteem. I have overheard conversations where parents have been advising their children not to study certain subjects because it is harder to get a certain mark or because a subject is not as well regarded. Inevitably, those are the arts and vocational subjects, those subjects that students really enjoy and can engage with. Regarding some of these trade-offs, then, I think we could get a better balance with some of these subjects if we had a better quality of conversation in this area.