Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 10 November 2020

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills

Leaving Certificate Calculated Grades 2020 and Preparations for Leaving Certificate 2021: Department of Education

Mr. Dalton Tattan:

We intend that the report will ultimately be published. We have to wait until we get to the end of the process, which still involves the exams and the final stage of the appeals. It is ultimately something that should be in the public domain and should be shared. However, we need to understand the process better. We have some sense of it, having gone through the experience, but we are still just coming out of it at this point. We need to understand what it was like, what worked and what could be improved. We obviously had issues like the errors, which nobody wanted. We would have liked not to have had to face into those but we had to correct them at very short notice. We need to learn those lessons but I reiterate that the intention is to run the exams unless it proves absolutely impossible to do so. We do not anticipate that that will be the case. Schools are open. They have gone through their first half-term successfully, they continue to be open and that is the intention. Next week is an important milestone for us as well. Small numbers of students will take the November exams but that will prove that it can be done while schools are also running.