Mr. Jim Miley:

I do not know the answer. We have sent our submission to the Department and hope to engage with it directly in the near future. I will ask the Department the question and, no doubt, the committee will do so in one way or another. I would like to think there should be a greater appetite for reform in the Department than there might have been heretofore. In a pre-Covid context, the Department might have looked on the leaving certificate as: "Let's not break it; it's a bit broken but it ain't badly broken so we don't need to fix it." The disruption of the past two years has not broken the system but has seriously agitated it. If there is not an appetite now, there never will be. This is a moment and the initiative by the committee is welcome because it helps, hopefully, to create the appetite for reform. We all need to drive that forward.

Transition year was mentioned but the Department of Education also reformed the junior cycle. There has been substantial reform to primary education in the past couple of decades. The Department has shown a capacity to reform and I would like to think now is the moment when it will embrace leaving certificate reform.