Dr. Ruth Freeman:

It is about rethinking what the senior cycle is about. The committee has heard us all in violent agreement that this final summit of high stakes is dominating the entire way we think about the senior cycle. There is a lot of evidence and I agree with Mr. McDonald that other countries are moving quickly and are looking at this evidence base about how people teach and learn. We know what we need to change; we just need to be bold about how we do it and to empower the teachers and the system to do it.

The continuous assessment and the calculated grades that happened during Covid are not the ideal scenario. That was an emergency response that we had to take on. It is important that we do not judge what a continuous assessment might look like based on that. We need to go back to the experts and researchers who are looking into this and who are developing ways that we can do more objective continuous assessment. We can empower and train teachers to do that. There is no doubt that additional skills will be required for teachers to do that. In terms of global citizenship, we must change the narrative that everything is about the points at the end of the day, and we heard about students almost complaining about teachers who went off-piste away from what they needed to do in the exam. That is when we can reframe the discussion and we need to think about school as more than just preparing for that academic pathway. It is for preparing for many different pathways and it is about preparing for life.

I will raise the following point because it comes up in a lot of our campaigns around women's' health and menopause. Are we equipping people to even look after their own bodies once they leave school? Are we giving people basic training in life skills? That has to be more than just a couple of modules in transition year. We need to think about those kinds of empowering skills for everyone. Once we change the dial and move the focus away from the final exam it opens up a world of opportunities for us to create more engaged citizens.