Ms Esther Doyle:

I may let my colleague from the NCAA, Ms Aoife Rush, talk about curriculum design, if she wishes. Every time we develop a curriculum, we learn something. We learned a lot from the reform we did to the junior cycle. We also have reports from the University of Limerick, the third of which has just recently been published. We learned a lot from the experience of introducing a new curriculum and a new junior cycle framework. We have learned from that and we have learned from every single senior cycle subject which has been developed in recent years, whether that is computer science, politics and society or any of the ones which have come in.

Although we have learned, there are some specific guidelines for this senior cycle in terms of the design of the curriculum. We are following the guidelines which have been put in place for this new senior cycle. Even more recently introduced subjects will be reviewed under the new guidelines for curriculum specification design.