Ms Rosie Bissett:

To keep the focus on examinations, extra time is the norm in other jurisdictions. It is almost the first thing that young people get in terms of their exams as opposed to here, where our accommodations very much look at the pure reading and spelling challenges. Extra time is also about taking in that processing speed issue, which is a challenge for students with dyslexia and other neurodivergent profiles. We also need to see a move towards a greater use of technology in exams. That is definitely a big issue. In the UK, for example, it is up to the school to decide if a student needs a laptop if a laptop is their normal way of working. In Ireland, there are very strict criteria for how you can use a laptop in exams. The system almost actively disincentivises our dyslexic students from using laptops in their education, despite the fact that we know they give those students huge access to learning and the ability to produce homework or written work, including in exams. They do not know until a couple of weeks or months before their junior cycle exam whether they are going to be allowed to use that device in the exam. We need a more holistic approach and to pull back decision timelines to give students an opportunity to avail of the technology that we have at hand in 2025, giving them equal access to learning materials and the best opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge on the day. Sive will probably be able to tell the committee about the feeling of running out of time in an exam, not getting all your answers down and having to re-read the question paper multiple times, not just to decode individual words but to work out what exactly the question is asking you to do. The readability of our exam papers is an issue we could be looking at too. There are many issues we could address in terms of exams.