Mr. Michael Gillespie:

Education is our greatest equalising and unifying endeavour. It is fantastic in what it can achieve. Education for education's sake should always be our primary goal. The CAO system is nothing more than a supply and demand system that is often based on demographics and it should not govern the leaving certificate. Deputy Ó Laoghaire referred to continuous assessment, but last year, when it was announced we were going to be using accredited grades, we had students coming to us and arguing every week over a couple of percentage points in homework assignments because they thought it was going to count towards their leaving certificate. That is just continuous pressure and is not solving the problem.

What has just been said is more akin to what the TUI wants. We want second components of assessment across the subjects, possibly even moved into fifth year, where we are teaching people what to learn and are focusing on the subject. At the moment, 22 subjects have second components of assessment and 12 have more than one second component of assessment. Some of these subjects can give students anything from 30% to 60% of the overall marks so that the nightmares that Deputy Ó Ríordáin was having from 1994 are not an issue anymore because students are continuously doing something and are learning their subject.

When I was a physics and maths teacher I was arguing with myself about teaching students for the leaving certificate while also trying to prepare them for the next phase of life, whether that involved becoming an apprentice electrician or going to college.

I had to teach the subject because if I did not do so, they would not be prepared for the next phase of life. That is why second component assessment, which would be things that cannot be marked on a written paper in June but would be testing a whole range of skills, attributes and different aspects of a subject over a two-year period, is the way to go. Such assessments can be done externally.

We cannot have a revolution here; because the leaving certificate is so important, it will have to be evolution rather than revolution. It will require, as Deputy Ó Laoghaire said, a lot of consultation and movement. It is too important to get wrong.