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

I thank the 13 Senators who spoke in this debate for their comments and for the general support I have received from Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin, the Independents and my Government colleagues. There is much meat in the document, and I will not repeat it now, but I want to focus on literacy and numeracy and then on the actual junior certificate and how it will be rolled out.

As Senator Power said, the literacy and numeracy levels were a wake-up call and it was recognised by the Department. Work had begun on a strategy before I became Minister and I have acknowledged that elsewhere and do so again now. It is systematically looking at learning outcomes at certain stages - second class, fourth class, sixth class and second year - on literacy and mathematics, or numeracy. There will also be a science dimension. That testing in second year, at approximately age 14, will be one of the four components that will feed into the school report which will come at the end of third year and which will have three other components to it.

There will be the assessment of project work. I note many Senators used the phrase "continuous assessment" but it is more project-based assessment rather than continuous assessment. This was brought to my attention by one of the teachers' representatives on the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment as misleading and, in some cases, creating a certain concern, so it is project assessment which, in most cases, comprises 40% and which is done over second year and third year. The examinations will be set by the State Examinations Commission in the first instance and then, over time, as we see how much confidence there is in the system, they will probably be set by the school itself. As I said, the State Examinations Commission will set the papers for the eight to ten subjects a student will do. The reason I went from eight to ten was to provide a wider range of choice. Two short courses can make up a full course or a full subject.

The fourth component of the assessment will be the normal school assessment which will try to capture all the things the examination does not, for example, the ability of the student to interact, his or her communication skills and what he or she has done in terms of music, sport, leadership, debating, communications or articulation. All of those things will form part of it.

I will not go through the individual contributions Senators have made but we know from experience, and many Senators have rephrased this, that the most popular teacher in first year is the teacher who teaches all around the subject, who actually brings it to life and who makes it interesting. By sixth year, or even third year, that teacher becomes the most unpopular because they are not teaching to the test. We know the whole culture alienates certain kinds of young people, a high cohort of which are working class boys. In many cases, the environment of the school and the way subjects are taught, as Senator O'Keeffe said, appeals more to a different kind of mentality and has those sorts of outcomes we have seen.

While the NCCA produced a good document, which I have endorsed from an education and pedagogic point of view, the main issue we had to get our heads around was how we locked that into a terminal in an examination. The decision not to have a high stakes State examination frees up three years and transition year where many of the proposals Members mentioned could be achieved. We will watch and measure and there will be standards.

For example, I refer to the concern expressed by Senator Barrett and others about a teacher being biased in third year. We will ask them to do what they do in second and fifth years in third year. In so far as there will be bias in this regard, that will be a problem for the school. We will also through the State examination system and the Department, send them the average results in a subject and we will outline to the schools how they are faring against average school performance. We will develop this in consultation with them. They will have their own results. A three-stream school will probably have 90 pupils. It will get results on the way it marks them and we will be able to show how that compares with the national average and whether they are in the band, above it or below it. In principle, this is what we will do. We are proceeding to work out the detail as to how we do it.

The second most important question was why it will take such a long time. We will start with the cohort going into the junior cycle in September 2014. Three years later they will do a different English examination and we will bring in other subjects over the following four years based on the capacity of the system to absorb the change and the experience we have had with Project Maths. We will review it all along the line.

I refer to the concerns expressed about whether this will change student behaviour and whether this will enable students to learn. We had a great deal of discussion in the Department about this and I believe it will totally change the dynamic within the system in that the dread felt by young people going into third year because they have to sit the junior certificate which they treat as a dress rehearsal for the leaving certificate will disappear. Between first and fourth years, including transition year, there will be a space within which one can come of age as a young person. We have all been through that. By the time a pupil leaves sixth class, he or she is a big person on the edge of adulthood in some cases. He or she is towering over the four year olds in the playground and moves from a school in which the teachers come to him or her generally in a fixed room and from a relatively small building to the equivalent of a shopping mall where on the hour, every hour crowds rush out into the corridors and everyone knows where they are going except the pupil and everybody is bigger. It is like snakes and ladders with the pupil at the bottom. As adults and parents, we know some young people do not make that transition satisfactorily and, therefore, as Senator O'Keeffe said, it is not just about teaching subjects. History teachers have as much responsibility for literacy as English teachers. Trying to instill that in the system is part of the role of leadership within the school system and necessitates teachers themselves changing.

When we were designing the literacy and numeracy strategy, there was a recognition that initial teacher education was incomplete and had to a certain extent lost its way, more time needed to be provided in this regard and the additional time should be focused on pedagogic skills. We need that at both primary and secondary level for teachers but we also need it for university lecturers. They have to learn how to teach as well. Their brilliant qualifications are not of themselves an indication that they are good communicators or teachers. I am examining the education system in a holistic way. This is a specific reform, which will inevitably transform the leaving certificate. It will be also be transformed from another direction. We are into detailed negotiations and discussions with university heads about the changing the foundation course approach in the third level sector.

Professor Áine Hyland's paper is available on transition.ie. She examined what happened over the past 15 to 20 years. The number of undergraduate courses in the third level sector, particularly in universities, increased by 300%. Universities are basically like football teams. They want the best players or students and they have constructed the courses in such a way that pupils get feedback saying they need 500 points to law in college X or university Y. They never indicate in many cases, although they are required to, how many places are available for a course such as law and German or law and Sanskrit. That debate has started with the third level administrators and while I do not want to anticipate the outcome, we are moving to a position where the first year for most people in third level will have an element of foundation about it. For example, in engineering in UCD, with which I am familiar, students do a basic foundation course in engineering in first year and it is only at the end of that year that they decide to become a mechanical, electrical or civil engineer. Professor Hyland cited the University of Melbourne. The specialisation of courses at an early stage is a phenomenon in the English speaking world, which is not unique to Ireland. In Melbourne, they have reverted to eight or ten foundation courses across the menu of options it has and people travel through that.

Members referred to the reaction of the teachers' unions to this issue and said they were not consulted. My brothers and sisters in the labour movement and in the unions have an understanding that consultation means negotiation. We are not negotiating about the destination. We are going for a new junior certificate examination and it is my responsibility as Minister to take the best advice available, which I obtained within the Department and from the NCCA, to evaluate the options and to examine how the new curriculum can be implemented. As I have said repeatedly, including at the NAPD conference in Galway last Friday, this is where we want to go. We will take eight years to get there and, therefore, there is no rush, unlike what happened in Britain where by trying to implement a quick fix in their system, irreparable damage has been done, according to the specialist journals in the area. We will consult all concerned, including the unions, about how to implement the passage to the destination we want to reach. This is not a political project in one sense. It is an intensely ideological political project in that we are trying to reform education but it is not an electoral project. There will be at least two general elections in the eight years it will take to implement this process. It is much more important to get it right than to meet an arbitrary deadline. The Department examined its own experience and the advice is that with the time provided we will meet the deadline. The time required will give us the necessary space in which to deal with legitimate concerns people have and to develop responses to the queries and questions that have been raised. By reforming the junior cycle component of second level, which is probably the weakest link in the education system, there will be an inevitable impact on transition year and the final two years in school during which there will be a proper State matriculation, leaving certificate type examination. More than 60% of our young people take on some form of third level engagement.

Senator Barrett referred to the question of Irish language learning. That is an issue for another day and there is only so much change one can mobilise at any one time. I was sent a copy of an interesting new book by Donal Flynn about the history of the language revival movement and where we are now.

I thank Senator Reilly for Sinn Féin's support.

Everyone spoke about the tragedy that is our literacy and numeracy standards. We cannot be complacent about it. Senator Averil Power referred to the resources made available. We will save some money from the State Examination Commission but we will spend more in terms of resourcing pupils and teachers through continual professional development, working with the Teaching Council and a number of measures in that area. The proposed cost of the literacy and numeracy strategy, including the changes in initial teacher education, is ¤19 million over a period of time. In that context, I saved ¤3 million by closing down the pilot project for modern languages in 500 primary schools out of our 3,200 schools. It was not recommended to be mainstreamed by the NCCA after being in existence for 12 years.