Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I propose, with the agreement of the Leas-Cheann Comhairle, to address the audience in the Gallery, rather than the non-audience in the Chamber. I will tell those of the school-going population in the Gallery who are perhaps in second year or third year what I will do over the next four or five years and what will be changed for them and their brothers and sisters who will follow them through the school system. First and foremost, the days of doing 12 exam subjects in the junior certificate is over. We will bring it down to eight subjects. We will change it from the system of being a mini-mac of the leaving certificate into a much more different grade system such that when students get their junior certificate and a person asks them how they did, they will not say they got so many points but will say what grades they got. We will learn how to teach ourselves differently and not what to remember but how to think. These students will be tested on their ability to think as young adults, not as young automatons on what they have remembered.

I wish to make another point about the change in the junior certificate which will affect examinations with effect from 2017, by which time I suspect, these students will have moved on in their studies. The name of the examination will not be the junior certificate. I have asked Leanne Caulfield, the President of the Irish Secondary Students' Union, to come forward with a new name for a new examination which will be different. At present, there is a terminal examination at the end of third year and 100% of the marks goes to that examination, but that will change. Some 60% of the marks will go to that examination and 40% will be based on portfolio work that students will have done from the beginning of second year right through to Christmas or thereabouts in third year, and that will be filed electronically and assessed electronically. Students will be pushing it up into the clouds, as it were, wherever they happen to be at school and it will be assessed in real time by people who will be able to assess it, perhaps by people teaching in another part of the country who will have no notion of the students but will be able to assess their work.

The second issue I wish to address is to examine how we can maximise our experience of transition year, which is considered by most people to be a very good experience but which varies from school to school. I will be talking to students and teachers about what they think could be better in the transition year programme. The way the points systems distorts the way in which students study the leaving certificate and the way their teachers have to teach them will also be changed. The predictability of examination subjects will be totally changed. When students read newspaper results in June 12 months about the junior certificate or the leaving certificate, they will not read stories to the effect that it was a good exam, there were no surprises and that it was as predicted. They and their teachers know what that means. It means that from the beginning of the course, the teachers say that Heaney will come up as the poet this year or the French Revolution will come up as the major subject so they will disregard the entire rest of the syllabus and train the students like talking and remembering monkeys to write down the answer that they can learn off to ensure they get the right marks and grades for the question on the French Revolution, Seamus Heaney or whoever. That is not education, it is memory training and it will finish under this Government.

We are going to say to the universities to stop manipulating the points system which they own. When I became Minister I thought that the points system was part of the parcel of the State examination system but it is not. It is a private company. The CAO is a private company owned by the seven universities. They allow the other institutions to come in and they take the A and A1, B and B1 and C grading of the leaving certificate and put mathematical values on every 5% high grade in that examination and come up with the points system. The points system was introduced in the 1990s and since 1999 onwards the number of course options, which these students or their older sisters or brothers will be looking at in February when they come to fill out the forms, has increased by 300%. Instead of the option to study German or law, they have the option to study German and law, law and French or law and Sanskrit, and the universities do not tell students, even though they are obliged by law to do so, how many spaces there are in the different courses. What the universities are doing is competing for the brightest of students in terms of points so that they can say that in their college or university, for a student to get into a course, he or she needs 510 points, nearly 550 points or 400 points.

We will make the universities end this nonsense, as was done in Australia. The University of Melbourne stated that a 17 or 18 year old person cannot decide prior to entering third level what detailed course he or she wants to do. The guidance councillors of the students in the Visitors' Gallery will probably tell them that less than 15% of students who put much effort into this know exactly what they want to study at that time. The University of Melbourne has gone back to basics with seven or eight foundation courses, such as in science, arts, languages, medical biology foundation and engineering. The UCD school of engineering is around the corner from here. If one does not know whether one wants to be a structural, mechanical or hydraulic engineer but one knows one wants to be an engineer, one's foundation course in first year will be simply engineering. There is a hell of a difference between the maturity of a 17 year old and that of a 19 year old and after this first year one can decide on the path one would like to explore.

We must regain the third level education system. We have a very good primary school system and we have very good infrastructure at third level. Of the 15,000 universities that exist in the world the seven universities in this small State with a population of 4.5 million are in the top 300. We need to maximise the value they have by ensuring when students such as those in the Visitors' Gallery go through the leaving certificate that they are taught how to think, reason, rationalise and argue for themselves and are not just tested to see how much they can remember in a two-hour exam after two years of study.

A student will make a rational choice on whether he or she is scientific, mathematical, good with people, good with numbers or making things and choose the course that makes sense. The student will then study the foundation course and after a year of reflection about how he or she wants to progress, at the age of 19 or 20, which is very different to the 16 or 17 year old student, he or she will decide in which direction to go. These are the changes the Government will make in our education system in the next four years.

The budgetary measures I introduced in recent weeks, which were enacted yesterday and which will be carried through, will enable me to ensure the basic building block of learning to read and write in our school system will be reinforced. It is a truism to state it, but we go to school to learn to read so that we can read to learn. If one does not know how to read well at the age of ten or 11 and goes from sixth class to first year and so finds it difficult to keep up with the learning process one will start to head towards the departure lounge after the junior certificate. The students in the Visitors' Gallery know people like this; they have sat beside them.

The new money for literacy and numeracy will ensure this deficiency in our education system will be reduced. Prior to handing over to my colleague, the Minister for State, Deputy Ciarán Cannon, I want to tell the House, now that we have two Opposition Deputies in the Chamber-----

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