Rose Conway-Walsh Urges Radical Reform of the Leaving Cert

Thank you very much, Cathaoirleach, and thank you to all the witnesses. I have listened intently last week and indeed this week to the submissions that are being made. As I see it, this is probably the biggest change management project we will undergo or we have undergone for decades. I note the differences in the approaches, if you like, and particularly where Mr Gillespie said, we need evolution rather than revolution, and then we have the Emer saying we need radical change. I am afraid I come down on Emer's side because I think we do need radical change. We have a decision to make here. We either tweak around the edges and try and keep everybody happy or we do something fundamentally different. I absolutely want to acknowledge the wonderful work that has been done inside the schools with very limited resources as it is. There is an opportunity here for change that we have never had before. Change management and change is always uncomfortable. It needs to be uncomfortable because we only make progress, I suppose, out of our comfort zones, so there will be a discomfort. In what we produce from this committee and all of the evidence we will hear, I think it is vitally important that we have resources attached to that, that we have a commitment from government that those resources will be delivered on. I think we all agree, looking at the leave-in search, I think there is agreement across the board that we need continuous assessment, that cramming everything in two weeks and then expecting young people to vomit up all they have learnt on the page and then to say you are either good or bad dependent on that and that dictates what you do in your additional education pathways. It is totally wrong, totally out of zinc with everything all of us believe in. It cannot go on. It cannot go on. We need to stop it and we need to stop it now. How we stop it and what we need to stop it are the two questions. I hear what has been said around the continuous assessment and the need for the external assessment. I suppose that is what I want to ask, maybe even yourself, Mr Gillespie, in terms of how the external assessment would work for that. I very much like the spread over two years, the different components or the different assessments that can be done along the way depending on the spread over the two years there, but we need reform. My greatest fear as well as, and all of us will know here, and we have to be honest about it, is the students that can afford to get the outside lessons, to get the outside tutoring, to get the outside supports, whether that be in a particular subject or it be in career guidance that you can go off and you can pay 250 euro for that. That is fine and that is okay, but the students that cannot afford that, the very bright students who cannot afford that, we are doing them an enormous, enormous disservice and that cannot be allowed to continue. When we did our study last year on third level, we saw that 75 per cent of students came back to us and said they did not get enough career guidance within second level. I do appreciate the honesty here from yourselves around that. It is impossible. One career, something so vitally important, one career guidance person for 700 students, completely. It is a waste of time. You might as well not have any and it does not matter whether that is a wonder woman or a wonder man or whatever. It is just ticking the boxes and we are doing too much of ticking the boxes. Until we do the resources properly, we are going to continue ticking the boxes. I know I have gone on a bit, but what you are doing here is really, really important, all of your voices. Maybe I will go back to Mr Gillespie around the external assessment first of the continuous assessment. Just maybe speak to me how that might work. I suppose you go back to the core idea which we have is that we develop second components of assessment in subjects that can start being assessed in fifth year in certain things. Obviously, they would be appropriate to the level of knowledge or skills or competencies that are based up at that stage. Again, it would be state certification of them and you would add together all those states, those second components of assessment. As I have already said, we have subjects already that you have 60% of the exam done due to second components of assessment before you sit an exam in May or June. This year, for example, Home Economics will be the first Leaving Cert exam started and it will start in December. The first component of assessment of Home Economics will be in December and it gradually builds up and adds together. And these things also measure different skills. If you design second components of assessment, it is not something that is just measured on a written exam paper. You are giving better opportunities to all the types of intelligences and learning of students. So, it widens the spread of what you can examine but also you widen what students can benefit from and that you are giving more opportunities to students. As you said there, Senator, the problem is that we are resource poor in schools. We are punching way above our weight in all the OECD things for the level of investment we have compared to other countries. And that is something that we should be proud of but why don't we make up the level of investment so that we do have the number of guidance teachers. We do have the therapeutic supports that were mentioned earlier for students who need it. And all these support systems are absolutely overstretched in our schools which limits our performance and limits helping students to achieve what they should be capable of achieving. And one of the faculties of that is the fact that we have already mentioned the amount of people who are failing in first year for a variety of reasons. It can be down for economic support and whatever. And even on a question earlier that was mentioned about why don't we have diversity of teachers. We have geographic and social issues about training teachers. You know because teachers in certain areas of the world can't get a placement for their postgraduate diploma in education because there is no availability of a college in their area. Therefore there is an added cost of having to do it in their local. So everything eventually comes down to finance and the lack of support financially to students and to the systems that need to support those students. So it all comes down to money. Yes, and I suppose obviously it needs to be targeted in the right place and prioritised. And I certainly, in terms of career guidance, it is something that we cannot allow to continue because people are not fulfilling their potential because they do not have the career guidance. And it very much fits into we can have all the apprenticeship programmes we want and all of the other alternatives if we do not have the career guidance there. To talk through individual students around where their strengths lie there. I do just want to say something before I finish and I am really glad to see in here, it is from the INTO submission around the special classes in mainstream and about people with particular needs or students with particular needs. And we talk about selecting students at second level and all that. But can I tell you, students are being selected at the age of five years of age when it comes to special classes. If you look at the county of Mayo, we have two excellent special classes, seven in each class, one in Ballina and one in Castlebar. And the demand for those, whether it be because children have been, have not got the supports in audiology for speech and language or speech and language therapies through no fault of their own. And the competition for those seven places, whether it can amount to six places between the two because you are not replacing the full cohort of the seven students each week. It is totally, totally wrong. We are absolutely excluding children at five years of age from our education system. And that is why we need reform right through it, not just leave and search reform. But I just was glad to see that mentioned in here in terms of the INTO and the challenges there. And that is purely a resource. Because I know, and even talking to these schools, they would be happy to have, and other schools, they would be happy, very happy in the principals, to have these special classes for speech and language within their schools. But they do not have the resources to be given. The resources are refused to them. And that is wrong because I know the wonderful outcomes from those classes. They are absolutely life changing. There is no other way to describe them. And I want to commend those schools who do such a good job in that sense. But we could talk. I am sure I am a chair. I have used up all of my time. It is invaluable to hear from Eimear and from Clare around this. And I thank you for giving us your time today. And we will, as a committee, be absolutely listening to what you are saying in terms of the reform that is needed. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. To adjust your career in you, see you doing this position. You can think of yourself in a really good tenthuk. All right.