Irish Education

An open letter to Orna Mulcahy and Leaving Cert Class of 2010

Today’s Irish Times has an article by Orna Mulcahy where she bemoans the fact that the points for college courses will be higher this autumn due to the increase in applications from mature students who have recently found themselves unemployed/between jobs/time advantaged (pick your own term). After more than a decade of falling points and …

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The Leaving Cert exam fiasco

So. The Irish Government (in the form of the Dept. of Education and the State Exams Commission [SEC]) are faced with a €1million bill because an exam Superintendent inadvertently distributed the wrong exam paper earlier this week. An avoidable root cause for this now unavoidable expenditure seems to be that the packaging that exam papers …

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Free Fees (with every packet of cornflakes)

So Batty O’Keefe is flying kites in the run up to the Leaving Cert results. Nice one centurion. He has proposed the reintroduction of college fees for students from families where people are earning an “excellent” salary. He defines this as being somewhere to the north of “anybody on €100,000” and “millionaires”. Mr O’Keefe seems …

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An Irish Open University….

Saw this on the Labour party website: Coughlan calls for the establishment of Irish Open University Interesting. What about: Oscail (www.oscail.ie) DCU’s distance learning school? What about UL’s courses in Project management that are offered over distance learning. And above all else… what about the Open University in Ireland? Perhaps what is needed is some …

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