Ms Teresa Griffin:

In terms of the working group, I was going to mention this in the context of the question that was asked about schools being taught through the medium of Irish and the availability of documentation as Gaeilge. I know of a person who was a principal of an Irish-medium school who is now an inspector. He very much took into account the needs of Irish speakers and people who were native Irish speakers, as opposed to Gaelscoileanna. He differentiated right across. A lot of thought has been given to how we can measure people for whom English is not their first language, in terms of Irish at least.

We have made a number of recommendations on standardised testing, including the need to future-proof it and making sure it is appropriate for use in the model. The Education Research Centre is starting work on analysing the current standardised tests and seeing how they can be modified to make sure that they can be improved and brought up to date. Ireland is now a multicultural society and the needs of all children will have to be taken into account in the Department's work when preparing the next round of standardised tests.