Rose Conway-Walsh on Leaving Cert: fairness, cross-border mobility, Irish

Goere maagad to you all. I have been listening intently online for part of this and now here. I really do think that this is one of the most refreshing and honest and valuable conversations we have had around Liebansart reform and what needs to be done. The combination, I suppose, of your own experiences and your own honesty around it is really appreciated and it is certainly very valuable in the report that we are trying to do here and in terms of trying to prioritise what we want to come out of this report because what we would not want to see is a hundred different recommendations and none of them implemented. I think we need to focus on some key things and I take in particular what you said yourself, Mr Miley, in terms of the transition and it taking possibly three years to do this on a phased basis on what we need to do. And preserving the benefits of the leave insert as it is because it is easy for us to say, oh, it is all rubbish and we need to change it without actually concentrating on that. So it has been quality assured, the continuity, the comparability, the equitable and it obviously being state certified, I think is important. I have three main questions and the first one is around the immediate challenge that faces us for the 80,000 students who are doing leave insert this year. You referred to the destabilisation of the results trend and the need to recalibrate. It was Dr Ryan who said that. How do we do that? That is the first question for all of you in the immediate term. In particular, the use of the random selection between applicants has occurred. How do we get away from that? Because I think there is an absolute unfairness and the sense of injustice from those who have been subject to that I think is ferocious and we need to deal with it. So that was my first question. Secondly, I want to look at the barriers to the cross-border student mobility in higher education and the value of A levels and the leave insert being very different. And what part do you think we should play as a reform of that reform of the leave insert? So given consideration to how we compare the A levels done by students in the north to allow students to apply for the different colleges across the island. And thirdly, the HECA and the leaving insert curriculum should be reformed to promote Irish as a living language. And could you, Professor Hegarty, expand on this further and outline the type of teaching students require? And do you believe that there may be an issue with teacher fluency? And would this type of change require much retraining for teachers? So there are my three main questions. Thank you. Thank you, Deputy, for very incisive questions. To deal with the immediate challenge, I quoted some statistics earlier, but another one that we put in our main submission to you is that in 2019, 13 per cent of students achieved 500 points or more. That was 26 per cent this year, so it was doubled. There are numerous other data points that you can look at. When we say recalibrate, we have to level the curve here. What we cannot do next year is have another yo-yo where we dive down into a valley again. So I think whatever decisions are taken have to gently flatten the curve. Ideally, it should not sit at the level it is at. It should come back down. But again, on a transitionary basis, that needs to be done. And I think that needs to be carefully calibrated. If we do not, we will continue to disadvantage because you are either disadvantaging next year's students or students from last year or the year before. So I think stability is absolutely critical. Even if it is an imperfect system, get it stable and then make the changes on that. You mentioned the cross-border issue. I think our proposals around timing are important in this regard. Deputy Farrell, if I may refer back to the chairman, asked earlier about the relative positions in other countries. So in Sweden, they get their results, the equivalent of leading search results on the 10th of June. Finland, end of May. Denmark, 5th of July. French Baccalaureate, first or second week of July. And the German Abitur by the 15th of July. And of course, then the UK, as you are aware, is earlier than us. But more than that, UK universities make conditional offers to students, sometimes in March or April. Now, we have a real challenge with attracting Northern Ireland students. And we have a very low level of Northern Ireland students studying here. And I think the timing issue has a huge factor in that. Because you have a student in Antrim or in Derry who has a choice available to them. Maybe in May or June and certainly by July in a UK university. And they are saying, you know, do I take it or do I wait and hope? And of course, they take it. Some of our member universities made a considerable effort in pre-COVID years, going back three or four years ago, to recruit more students from Northern Ireland and did not succeed very well. So, I think the timing issue is one factor to address that. I think there are other issues around A levels, but I am probably not best qualified to comment on that. Okay, Mr Ryan. Thanks very much Chair and thank you Deputy for the questions. They were razor sharp. I will absolutely support Jim's points on the ones. I will not labour all that again. I think obviously when we went down to the reform of the leading strategy a number of years ago, it was to try and get a greater granularity so we would not get into the problem. COVID has obviously been the issue here. I think the unfairness is particularly for those who are presenting with results from previous years. So, it seems to me that if things stay stable, there will have to be some mechanism to accommodate that and to recognise that for a period. It won't be perfect as Jim says, but I think to try and get the stability back in the system is the critical piece here. But the Leaving Cert has very highly respected standards. So, I fully agree with Jim's point going back to questions asked earlier about holding the Leaving Cert though, as an element in the determined, as I said, for higher education. But most likely because of those few high demand programmes. And this is my tail wagging the dog bit. There might be an extra bit that is put on for those. On the questions of the cross-border piece, I am conscious of the work that the Royal Irish Academy did on higher education futures, which is very much an all-island piece. And the North West, as you know, Deputy, was a big feature in that. And I think the fact that there is that all-island context and a shared island, I think there is a chance maybe to look under that again at this. Because as Jim quite rightly says, the traffic actually is less than one would have thought. Just given the situation at the moment, and obviously with Brexit, et cetera, you are looking at questions of research, research collaboration, et cetera. So the dynamic has changed somewhat on that. Now, our registrars have looked at this. They do benchmark and it is possible that it is time to look at this again in that context. Thank you very much. DEPUTY, I noticed earlier in the meeting when you were actually zooming in online, we were looking at marrying you, taking assiduous notes. So just to return the compliment that you actually gave us at the beginning. Can I just say in relation to two things? One in relation to, you asked a question about random selection and you asked a question about Irish language to reply to those. One, on random selection, it is a real problem, but I think we have to ask ourselves how many places are available in medicine? What is the limit on them? The limit is the number of clinical places. We have to ask, well, how many of those clinical places are actually taken up by non-EU students? It is a very significant number. Now, the universities basically have to effectively, to balance the books, they have to effectively market medical education abroad, and they get very substantial fees for that. Maybe the government might consider actually buying some of those places, and that would give more places, in fact, to Irish students. That is one solution to a random selection thing. Ultimately, it is a function of COVID. I think the swelling in numbers and random selection will ultimately. We may have that problem again if we have more continuous assessment. Anyway, I hope it is a temporary problem. The question of Irish, I am going to give you a very subjective answer to your question. My French is much better than my Irish. I can conduct a meeting in French with the French team. I found myself as a team of six in the project in Vietnam, and all the other five were French speakers. Naturally, the language of the travail was actually French, which I had to live with. Had the language, a working language for that, been Irish, I think I might have had more difficulty. That is a terrible thing to have to say to fellow Irish citizens. I believe it was because in the teaching of education of Irish that I experienced, I really did not develop a love for the language. I did develop an affection for French, which improved. I had a great French teacher. So, what do we need to solve the problem? It is too late to solve the problem for me. Maybe not. Never stop learning. But what do we need to solve the problem in schools? I think we probably need to focus on oral Irish. We need to focus on continuous assessment. We need to focus on the richness of the Irish language. I do not know whether you heard there was a poet, Maura. She died. There was a programme last night on RTE, the Arena programme, where they were talking about her work and talking about how she felt in the Irish language. The language of affection, the language of emotion was so much richer in that regard. I think we have really got to get that across to our young people in the teaching of Irish, so that they actually understand the richness of the language, and they need to use it on a daily basis. I think it would be helpful to help them if we had a measure of their skill, something like TOEF or IELTS or something like that, and we said, OK, we are going to set a national requirement. I am going on too long already, but I could go on at length really and answer your question. You have a couple of seconds left if you want to ask a question, but I will not allow them to come in until the very end. I think we need to have each individual contributor here on separate sessions and we could fill it in terms of us expanding and developing things, I suppose in terms of training of the Irish language teachers, how that needs to change and what we need to do for that, to create a love of the language rather than a fear of the language, which I think many of us have. I can identify with what you are saying in terms of not having the confidence to speak as a scale. OK.