Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Fifth year students, the leaving certificate class of 2021, lost close to three months of face-to-face teaching time this year. I know that the Government and the Minister accept that changes must be made to take account of that lost time. I was going to say that I had an exchange with the Minister earlier today but it was yesterday at this point. In that exchange, she indicated that the change was going to take the form of giving a greater degree of choice to next year's leaving certificate students. That seems like a sensible approach to take but of course, the devil is in the detail. Do the changes go far enough and are they acceptable to the broad mass of students? Precisely when will the students find out what the changes are going to be and the greater choice that they will have? Will they find out on the first day when they go back to school, later in the month of September or the week before Christmas? When will students find out about the changes that are being made?

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