Hildegarde Naughton has defended the decision not to hold a Citizens’ Assembly on education, saying a convention was more appropriate structure.
The Minister for Education and Youth was speaking to the 150 people gathered in Athlone for the first meeting of the Government’s convention on education. More than 5,200 applied to be part of the weekend, and more than 42,000 took part in an online survey that partly shaped the agenda for the weekend.
The previous government pledged to create a Citizen’s Assembly on education that would examine issues such as patronage reform and modernising the Leaving Certificate. However, the pledge was dropped from the current programme for government and last year then minister for education Helen McEntee announced the convention format instead.
Naughton described it as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to shape Ireland’s education system “for decades to come”.
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“You will identify areas that you think that we should be focusing on for the next 30 years or so,” she said, adding that the convention’s recommendations will inform a long-term education strategy for her department.
The Minister pointed out that an assembly is typically made up of 99 randomly selected members of the public and one chairperson.
“This has 150 members and what’s really different about this convention is that the voice of young people and students who are in the room here aged between eight and 24 will have equal weighting in relation to their views around what our education system should look like,” she said.
Attendees were divided into groups of children and young people, parents and guardians, educators and school employees, and education stakeholders. They sat at round tables to facilitate group discussions.
The group will convene four times in total, delivering independent recommendations to Government at some point after their final weekend in November. On Friday, a pre-convention session was held with the group of 32 young people to set out a range of principles underpinning the programme.
“They have ideas,” said Anne Looney, chair of the convention and a former executive dean of Dublin City University’s Institute of Education. “We got a glimpse into some of those yesterday, and they’re also taking the responsibility very, very seriously.”
Throughout the morning, references were made to the 1993 education convention of a similar nature that is credited with mapping out subsequent decades of education policy in Ireland.
Naughton remarked on how much had changed over the past 33 years, and asked the group to use their imagination in designing a vision for education in Ireland decades from now.
“The people who participated in the [1993] convention were all insiders,” Ms Looney added. “They were the people who were working in the school system; they were the education stakeholders. This time, we have the full range of people in the room.”
That range, Looney explained, includes children and young people with special needs, and from varying economic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The main issues will be determined by the 150 in attendance.
“It was all about disadvantage in 1993,” she said. “Now, we’re looking at the full range of need, and how do we create a school system that can support the Ireland that we have ... inclusion, I suspect, is going to be a very big theme.”
Another topic likely to arise is technology and artificial intelligence (AI). The Minister said AI was “an important issue that we all need to be grappling with”, adding that “we’re living in a digital world and we all need to be able to navigate that safely”, not only in relation to AI but to the general online space.
