Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party)
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I thank Mr. Tattan, Dr. Hislop and Ms Feeney for joining us today.

I believe that the wrong decision was made to cancel the leaving certificate. It has been proven now to have been detrimental, I would say, to an awful lot of students and young people in terms of their mental health.

Steps could have been taken but we are where we are now. That was not a decision for the witnesses and I appreciate that but I just wanted to make that point.

In terms of next year and the issue of standardisation, all the commentary and rhetoric at the moment is that students attending DEIS schools have done better under the current system. What steps are being taken with regard to standardisation for next year to ensure we do not see a backsliding in the advancement for those students?

Students have told me about the negative impact on their self esteem of being downgraded vis-à-visthe grades their teachers gave them or of not being graded very highly by their teachers even though they were doing the hard slog. I was one of those students who did the hard slog but was not noticed by teachers as being particularly bright. I have spoken to the quiet students who are very bright and who knew they were putting in the hard work. They have told me that the rhetoric is that most people have seen an increase in their grades and that makes them feel ashamed that they have done worse than expected. My understanding from previous briefings is that one of the issues taken into consideration was a ranking of grades within classrooms and that is where the problem seems to lie for these students. In a class of five students, for example, who are all very well performing, the fear is that the ranking of grades results in a downgrading. Is that correct? I know that outliers were taken into consideration and have heard that from ministerial advisers but was the situation of classes with numerous high-performing students taken into consideration too?

Many students have contacted me not only about missing out on their schooling in the run up to the original leaving certificate date but also about missing out on the help that students would have been given in other years in the run up to the exams. Is that correct? Were any steps taken to help the students who will be sitting their exams next Monday?