Dr. Anne Looney:

It is a matter of providing students with a statement of their achievement as they move into and out of education. The junior certificate examination was previously the school-leaving examination; now 90% of the cohort stay on so it no longer has that function. Offering students a statement at the end of their education is probably done by most systems. How students are given that statement and what is done with it afterwards varies across systems, but generally at the end of the school system, a student should have some way of assessing what he or she has learned and getting some kind of recognition for what he or she has done. Most stages of education have some kind of assessment.