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

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. When officials from the Department of Education appeared before us a number of months ago, I asked them what the main difference was between the time I did the leaving certificate in 1994 and the leaving certificate now. The suggestion from the Department was that it was not different in any radical way. At its inception, the leaving certificate was a qualification with which one went into the world. Now, it is a qualification with which one goes on to the next stage of education. There is a different dynamic that goes with it now.

Indeed, when we were trying to reform the junior certificate we had that same kind of view that young people do not go into the world with their junior certificates as they might have done with their intermediate certificates back in the day. This is the question I really have for the witnesses. We are trying to reform something that everybody or most people accept needs to be radically reformed. There is a level trust with the leaving certificate, however, and we must be careful about how we tinker with that. People feel that it is transparent; I would not use the word "fair". It is incredibly brutal.

We have come to the stage now where people who do it successfully become good at doing leaving certificates. There is an industry built around it. We must be honest about that. There are grind schools and people who are willing to sell notes. There is a whole industry built around getting one's child or a young person through this system. Parents are able to buy or use those extra resources. There is, therefore, fundamentally an inequality at the heart of the leaving certificate.

Not every school is the same and not every school can offer the same options. Not every school can offer higher level Irish, English and mathematics and basic core subjects such as those. How do we come to a scenario, therefore, where if we are going to assess people, we are assessing them fairly? How do we ensure that every student has the opportunity to study whatever subject he or she feels best fits his or her skill set and can study it at whatever level he or she feels they can? How unfair is it to have a second-level school that does not offer honours or higher level Irish thereby restricting that young person from ever being a primary school teacher, for example? Those schools exist. I remember once being a secondary school substitute teacher. I came across a young woman who was teaching herself higher level mathematics in a room by herself because there was no higher level maths teacher in the school. The level of determination that young woman went through to do and study that is unthinkable in a more middle-class advantaged scenario.

This is my general point. What kind of discussion is going on as to how to level out that inequality to ensure that every student, no matter what school he or she goes to, can through remote learning or any other way avail of every single possibility or level of subjects he or she can? Yes, we may have a transparent leaving certificate but it does not have the brutality and inequality attached to it.

I will touch on when Deputy Ó Laoghaire and I attended the teacher conferences. There was a sense of resistance to this idea of assessing one's own students from the conferences we attended. If we are going to reform then we must reform. I cannot pretend that the teacher unions have ever been friends of reform when it comes to examination structures in Ireland. I bear the wounds of the junior certificate reform process in that regard. We have to bring people with us whatever our opinions. They are my two main points. How do we make it fairer than just being transparent? How do we bring people with us?