Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

As Deputies are aware, on Thursday afternoon the House will have an opportunity to debate the junior certificate cycle reform in some substance over two hours.

There is also a question further down the Order Paper that addresses some of the questions that have been put in supplementary form by Deputy McConalogue.

Let us step back a little in terms of history. The National Council for Curriculum Assessment has been recommending changes in the junior cycle for over ten years. Some sectors in the education stakeholders' camp confuse negotiations with consultation and confuse consultation with negotiations. It is the responsibility of the Department and the Minister, taking the best advice from the entire array of stakeholders, to digest that advice and to make decisions. Once that decision is made, then all the stakeholders will be fully consulted as to how best to proceed to reach the targets that are set. Deputy McConalogue cited Great Britain, and I specifically mean Great Britain but not necessarily Northern Ireland because it has a different approach to education from Britain. One cannot chop and change the education system overnight. It is too big, too delicate and too sophisticated an entity for that to be done.

What we have done to get it right - it is not a delay but a deliberate decision on my part - is to decide that the first step in the direction of the reform will start in September 2014 and in 2017 the first cohort will sit, under the new regime that I have just described, English as a subject. The following three years will see the roll-out of the remainder of the subjects. During the course of that journey to get from here to there we will be monitoring all of the implementations involved.

The two secondary school unions directly involved in the junior cycle, the TUI and the ASTI, had members on the working party which looked at and came up with the curriculum. Their concern is with the diminution of the junior certificate examination as a high-stakes examination and it becoming a school examination rather than a high-stakes or State examination.

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