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

The NCCA did not reckon it was worth mainstreaming. We hope our primary school teachers, who now study for four years and who are coming from the top 15% of leaving certificate results, will have at least one modern continental language and will be able to teach it as primary school teachers so that we do not need dedicated primary school language teachers. We would like to move in that direction.

With regard to initial teacher education at secondary level, we are not yet developed in terms of what we want to happen but my personal political view is that someone who wants to qualify as a secondary school teacher should have an experience of teaching across the spectrum rather than being the bright young boy or girl in school, going to university, doing an arts degree, coming back as a local hero to the school when undertaking teaching experience and going on to teach in that school. It is too incestuous and there are serious problems for secondary school teachers in terms of the nature of the school contract at second level. These are issues I want to discuss with the joint managerial body, JMB, and others because the career path is not as clear in second level for teachers of subjects as it is for primary school teachers in the primary school system. The attraction of good teachers into the secondary school system is a key component of reform of the junior certificate.

I have covered the points raised by the Senators. On the question of science, Senator Crown is correct. The tea party phenomenon that is part of the United States and the creationist museum in one of the southern states of the US, where there is a saddle on a dinosaur to indicate that they were contemporaneous inhabitants of the earth, is hard to credit and hard to understand but is not confined to the United States. The teaching of evolution based on evidence does not happen in large sections of the world. Science is a critical component.

We are trying to examine the capacity within our schools, with 730 post-primary schools. The new ones we are building have a population of 800 to 1,000, which provides us with a critical mass that enables schools to provide subject choice at higher and ordinary level, the required support services, the school orchestra, for example, and an array of sporting activities and the arts. These are the elements that produce the kind of rounded young person we want to have, confident in themselves and able to look after themselves from the age of 15 or 16. We are trying to achieve that through the reform of the junior certificate, which we do not yet have a name for but which will evolve. We are doing so in two ways, by articulating the curriculum the NCCA developed over a long period, and by deliberately removing the junior certificate State exam, which has a distorting effect on behaviour, from mock exams at Easter to the outcome. It exists to the extent that youngsters, including my son, who is now in his leaving certificate year, automatically convert results into points. When he emerged with his junior certificate results, he told me how many points the results represented. That is the distorting effect and it is distorting the way teachers perform because they are required to get results. Parents and schools demand results and this creates a backwash effect, which prevents the wider spectrum of young people, whose needs our current system of education does not address adequately. With the implementation of this, the changes we can begin to negotiate in the leaving certificate, in tandem with and in parallel to this eight year journey, will allow us to radically improve the second level experience.

Finishing with an anecdote, the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Leo Varadkar, and I went to a photocall for the Gathering in one of the schools in Marlborough Street. Young children were writing to their relatives to encourage them to come to Ireland for the first time. Instead of the normal configuration of tables in a primary school, for those Members familiar with it, the desks were set out in serried rows. I asked the deputy principal of the school why the desks were assembled in this fashion. One of the aides or PR people explained that a photographer was present and they wanted it to look like a real school. Real schools at primary school level have abandoned serried ranks and there are now clusters of four and five children facing each other and learning together in group learning and discussion. The problem exists at second level, where students sit in ranks and rows. The culture in primary school is more developed and more advanced than at second level. This measure will go a long way towards achieving that. We will monitor it and consult and inform as we go along. No one has a monopoly on wisdom and we are open to full and comprehensive consultation on how to get where we want to go. The destination is not up for negotiation.