Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I wish to address a pressing issue for the leaving certificate students of 2020, particularly that cohort who went through their course with a pattern of high achievement but were marked down and have missed places in medicine. Many sat the exams in November and now face the deadline to register for the health professions admission test, HPAT, which is a necessity for medicine.

The registrations for that opened today and the deadline is 15 January with an extension until the 1 February. The problem is the leaving certificate results will not be out until late February. Consequently, if these students do sufficiently well to exceed the points then they get to carry their 2020 HPAT over into 2021. If they do not, they will need to sit the HPAT in 2021 but they will not know that until they get the leaving certificate results. We therefore have this anomaly where they do not know whether to register.

I have written to the Minister for Education and the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and I am not getting any traction. To be fair, the latter Department is taking action on it. I ask that we write a letter to the Ministers on behalf of these students who need to know with certainty. They have been through enough. They have had enough mental torture with their leaving certificate and the manner in which they were handled, which is currently before the courts. They now have the anxiety of their results coming out and need some sort of certainty regarding their HPAT and whether to register for it. We need certainty so I ask for action on that issue.