An insider's guide to education

** The Minister for Education, Batt O’Keeffe, is in a race against time as he seeks to push through major reform of the Junior Certificate while still in office.

Next month, his advisory group on exam issues – the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) – will deliver an options paper on a new Junior Cert. Ideally, O’Keeffe would like to roll out the exam from September 2010 but this is a tall order, given the snail’s pace of reform in education.

The recasting of the exam offers a wonderful opportunity to update and modernise the outdated Junior Cert exam. Ideally, the new exam would be very strong and interactive on science and computer technology.

Other items on our wish-list include:

• Preserving only English and maths as compulsory subjects, giving students an opportunity (like those clever Finns) to study Chinese, Japanese , Russian and Spanish in significant numbers;
• Introducing a less bookish business programme, one designed to boost enterprise and reflect what is actually going on in the business world and the economy;
• Making full use of mobile phone, social networking sites and modern communications for teaching and learning;
• Nurturing critical appraisal of the arts and the media.

But will any of this happen? Don’t hold your breath. As ever, the agenda will be set by the needs of the teacher unions whose primary objective is to maintain the pay and conditions of members.

O’Keeffe has an opportunity to strike out and do something very radical; a state of the art exam which would deliver a real legacy to the education service. Will he take it?

** The forthcoming report from the National Strategy on Higher Education, chaired by economist (and friend of Brian Cowen) Colin Hunt has been already been billed as a landmark document which will shape the third-level sector for decades to come .

There is some very good, thought- provoking material among the 100-plus submissions posted on the website of the Higher Education Authority (hea.ie). Recommended reading for anyone with an interest in higher education.

** Congratulations to the country's best-known education academic (and former Irish Timescolumnist) Professor Tom Collins, who has been appointed vice president at NUI Maynooth.

Collins, the warmly regarded former head of education, is the new Vice-President for External Affairs. His successor in Education is Dr Aidan Mulkeen, who returns to Maynooth after a sabbatical to the World Bank as a Senior Education Specialist.

** Showtime, Pat Leahy’s terrific book on the Bertie years provides an interesting insight into education politics.

It reports how Noel Dempsey (with Ahern, below) was reshuffled out of Marlborough Street because of his difficulties with the teacher union, despite (our words) his strong, combative performance in the brief.

When he left, Bertie’s sole advice to his successor, Mary Hanafin, was to keep the unions happy. That, it appears was the number-one priority of the Ahern administration.

Got any education gossip? Email us, in confidence, at teacherspet@irishtimes.com