Ms Andrea Feeney:

I thank the Senator for her questions. In a moment, I will ask my colleague Ms Sheridan, our head of examinations and assessment division, to deal with the teacher qualifications and questions on the examiner supply. Our budget and allocation for 2022 is €77.395 million. In a normal year, we would collect an additional €10 million in fees, but there are no fees for the examinations this year. On technology and what we have done, the figures we shared are quite stark as regards the increase in candidates and the more than matching decrease in the number of examiners. We have invested in digitisation of the examinations over the last number of years. Some 410,000 results were issued this year at leaving certificate level. Of those, 389,000 were either fully or partially marked using our online marking system. There is no doubt that the online marking system and that transition to online marking has assisted us in managing the challenge of a decreased examiner supply. It makes the experience of examining much more straightforward and streamlined for the teachers involved. That is one aspect of digitisation.

We made continuous improvements across all of our services in the last number of years with greater use of our candidate self-service portal. We also have a school portal for the transaction of electronic and digital course work from schools to the SEC. All of those things have greatly enhanced our capacity and efficiency as an organisation. Given what we as an organisation have been asked to do over the past number of years with the considerable changes each year since 2019 due to the pandemic, we have responded in an agile fashion to meet those challenges. On what the future will hold in relation to senior cycle reform, there is a mandate within the senior cycle reform announcement to look at opportunities for digital assessment.

We already have an element of digital assessment in computer science, digital course work as I mentioned, and computer-aided design that is used for design and communications graphics coursework. It is not that there is nothing, but certainly more work can be done.

We have had some engagement with international jurisdictions as to what they do and how they manage the challenge of e-assessment. Do we see a time when all students will sit down in June and do their examinations online? We are somewhat away from that, but certainly as part of the research that is needed into senior cycle reform, we can envisage some changes into the future.

I ask my colleague Ms Sheridan to deal with the question on teacher qualifications.