Mr. Dalton Tattan:

I thank the Senator. One of those opportunities is something we have touched on already, namely, the provision of different sorts of diversity of opportunities for students to be able to demonstrate their knowledge, skills and competencies. That would be helpful, if we could achieve it. Other countries and other systems have managed to do that. As I mentioned earlier, for some of the newer subjects and in updating the specifications of existing subjects, we have sought to try to bring in other forms of assessment, including digital assessment. We can leverage that more while still ensuring fairness. We have to ensure that there is fairness, accessibility, equity and so on. That is one real opportunity.

Sticking with the assessment piece, a second opportunity is around spreading the assessment load. I spoke earlier about the stress that students face, and in terms of feeling that all of their eggs are in the one basket of a written examination in June. We could consider opportunities that would help to alleviate that. This happens to some extent already in the context of music orals and practicals, and other forms of practicals, which happen at times other than in June. There are elements of that within our existing system, but there may be ways to enhance that further and to spread the load such that students would not face a lot of high stake things coming all at the one time.

A further opportunity outside of assessment is, perhaps, integration. We have a number of programmes at the moment. We have the leaving certificate established, which the vast majority of students undertake. We also have the vocational programme, which has really good modules and practical things such as enterprise education and the world of work. Yet, students have to do the LCVP in order to access those. We also have the leaving certificate applied, which we feel is a strong programme and a very successful programme but it sometimes denies opportunities for students pursuing that programme to do other things in leaving certificate established. There are also issues about progression around LCA as well. It is about finding ways through which it would be more student-centred so that students would be able to find ways to get access to things and that we do not have barriers put up necessarily to the sort of experiences that they can get access to.