Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I commend the teachers and the other school staff. I know how hard they work and have been working over recent years in extremely difficult circumstances. As a parent of a leaving certificate student, I can tell the Minister that this is a very stressful period for both the students and the parents of many of those students. She can take it as a fact that I have been getting a large number of emails from students who say time and time again that what they have experienced over the past year has been extremely difficult and they are very concerned about own leaving certificate results and how they will then progress into college. The Covid pandemic was an uncertain time for us all. As adults, we had to navigate it and its uncertainty when it came to our employment and our mental and physical health. These students have lost out on a huge chunk of their social life. I refer to junior certificate students and those who have lost out on a lot of the milestones they would have otherwise had. They now have to cope with all these things alongside the leaving certificate and the exams.

I will give the Minister an example. My son's maths curriculum will not finish until March. It should have been finished before Christmas in order that the students could revise properly. They cannot revise something they have not learned. There are, therefore, huge difficulties because, as was explained earlier, there are teachers who have not been in because of Covid. One Irish teacher, because of long Covid, was not in for six weeks. There are other teachers getting Covid; there are students who had Covid. They are sitting in classrooms in the freezing cold. They are wearing jackets, hats and scarves. It is not an environment for children to try to learn in. Let us imagine us sitting in this room with all the windows open, in the freezing cold. We would not be happy with that experience. We would not be happy to sit an exam in those conditions.

I ask the Minister to consider a hybrid model and to listen to the students. Tomorrow I will meet students in Coláiste Pobail Setanta, Ongar, Dublin 15. They have asked us to come out there to listen to them. If the Minister has time tomorrow, I urge her to come out to the school to listen to those students, to listen to their experiences and to take them on board.

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