Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle and I am sharing with my good colleague, Deputy Verona Murphy. I welcome the opportunity to be able to speak on this Bill this evening. We have had a sea change. I was reflecting on what Deputy Bruton was saying, on what has happened in the past two years in education and how the whole system was forced to change because of the pandemic. Our students, teachers, parents and boards of management were all thrown into a new way of doing things. It is very difficult but it was something that was forced on us all. It has been a very traumatic experience and the reality is that there was a great deal of uncertainty.

This Bill is giving some certainty for the leaving certificate class of this year as to what they are doing. The decision to provide the system of accredited grades is to be welcomed but we also need to look at this right across education and what we are doing in it. As a former lecturer in Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, GMIT, continuous assessment is one of the key components of a student's development and it should be brought in at first year in secondary school and, in fact, at national school level.

One of the things I always refer to in respect of education is that I learned Irish for 13 years and I still cannot speak it. There is something wrong that despite my best efforts, I cannot speak it after all that time. We did not do much practice; we simply memorised everything. We got it right for the examination and it went out of our heads again then straight away.

There are a number of suggestions that the Minister should look at with the Department. A review should be initiated of the whole pathway to the leaving certificate as to what is going to happen to the students who will be sitting their leaving certificate examination in 2022, as they have also been affected by this pandemic. We should put what we have learned in the past year to 18 months to best use for next year and further on than that.

We also need to look at our own performance within the Department for special needs education and how we can adapt and be more flexible with that.

We need to do a review of school buildings and how we build them so that we are better prepared into the future so that the modern school can adapt in a better way.

A further review is needed in respect of technology, distance and remote learning and how that can be blended into working in school to give a full experience, while at the same time giving people good experience on how to work from home as well, at particular times and on certain projects.

Other aspects of the review I would like to see happening would be on the continuous professional development of teachers and how we train them on doing things differently from how they were done in the past, so that we have more continuous assessment, less testing and more development of the student skills on an incremental basis right throughout the five years of secondary school, rather than having a cliff-edge exam at the end of it.

I agree that everybody should have access to third level education. We have the opportunity to do that now. We should look at that because the time has come for change but this change has to happen in a very progressive way.

Right through this experience in education, one of the things that came to the fore is that young people truly value their education. They want to have certainty in what they are doing and they also need a framework set out for them so that they know before the start of the year what is in front of them, be that continuous assessment, some examinations or blended learning. I hope that this opportunity we have, with its potential for change for the better in education will stand our young people, our country, our economy and our society very well into the future. If the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we can make change when we are forced to do so. When we are in that focus of change, we need to grasp the opportunity to change our education system to ensure that the student gets the best in life and that we produce students who will be exemplars in our society. I thank the Ceann Comhairle.

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