Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Leader to invite my fellow Ulster man, whom I am very happy to congratulate on his appointment, the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy McHugh, to the House to discuss the CAO applications process. As everyone knows, the CAO is the mechanism by which we assess and allocate college places, based on a points system related to performances across academic subjects. I want to make a specific proposal and I would like the Minister to come to the House to address it. I am proposing that 80 points - that figure is open to negotiation - of the now 630 points are taken away, with 50 of them committed to involvement in social work and social action and the remaining 30 committed to sport and cultural activities, to be monitored and assessed by a subgroup of teachers in the pastoral care sector of the school and to be part of the assessment of the child. This would create a social awareness in our young people. It would create an interest in social action and social concern, which is a crucial in young people. The cultural-sporting dimension would reward children for participation in school musicals, the county minor teams and so on so that their sporting and cultural lives would develop. The question might be in some people's minds that this would compromise academia and reduce academic performance but the contrary is the case as it would bring social concern, social awareness and social commitment, plus sporting and cultural development, into academia. Students would do a much better job and better understand their academic studies. Whether studying the humanities, the social sciences or science in general, they would do so with a consciousness that is very important. We need to have young people who understand their society and how it works. I am effectively asking the Leader to invite the Minister for Education and Skills to the House to begin the debate in this House - it should be in this House - on how the points system functions, what it assesses in young people, what type of young people it prioritises into courses and what we could do complement what is there. I appeal to the Leader, who is an educationalist, to give this urgent priority.