Ms Andrea Feeney:

We are providing 41 curricular subjects at leaving certificate level and all but 12 of those have a second assessment component. As we said in our opening statement, while people think about innovative forms of assessment as something that is quite recent, if we look at subjects such as construction studies, wood technology and design and communication graphics which have been around for a long time, we see that forward-thinking forms of assessment are associated with them. They test students' practical skills. I had a conversation with someone recently about the construction studies room in a school being the most creative space in a boys' school. It did not offer music or art so that was the creative space in that particular school. We are currently providing those forms of assessment. Again, as I mentioned in the opening statement regarding senior cycle reform, the three science subjects, biology, physics and chemistry, are in that development space at the moment.

Where new subject specifications are being developed it is now being tied into senior cycle reform. Part of the policy objective there is to bring in school-based formal assessment to have a second component in every subject. This adds complexity but it was a journey that we were on anyway. For a long time, the objective for the senior cycle has been to have all subjects assessed, not only by means of the written examination but by another component that allows for the assessment of skills, knowledge and competencies that a written examination simply is not capable of assessing.

We do not want to harp on about computer science because we talked about it a lot but it is an interesting model of what is possible. The feedback the NCCA has gathered on the early enactment and students' experience is that all of this is building to a love of the subject and a way of working that is more akin to what they will do when they leave school and go into to the world of work. There is no doubt there have been challenges, and there will be challenges ahead, but we will meet them.