Teaching Matters: According to Michael Fullan, one of the best known authors in the world of education, "major new solutions are needed in schools".

At one level, at least with regard to Ireland, this might be difficult to understand. There have been many major initiatives in Irish primary and second-level education in recent years - in introducing curricular reform and a major school building programme.

So what are the issues in Irish schools which require such "major new solutions" and what might these solutions look like?

Education systems, generally, are driven by their assessment processes. That which is assessed is that which is attended to and is accorded value. If it is unassessed, it is unvalued.

The Leaving Certificate sets the agenda of the second-level school. On entering second-level school the child is placed on a track with an end point five or six years in the future. Far from being a distinct point, the Junior Certificate is little more than the Leaving Certificate for small people! What little value it appears to have lies mainly in the extent to which it provides an indicator of aptitude and ability for performance in the Leaving Certificate.

To effect a major new solution then in second-level would require a dilution in the dominance of the Leaving Certificate so as to free up the first three years in secondary school from the long shadow which it casts on the lives of Irish teenagers.

On the basis that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, it seems prudent to begin the effort to change at Junior Certificate level rather than at the Leaving Certificate. Ideally this would involve the creation of two sections within second level - a junior school and a senior school - each of three years duration.

The Leaving Certificate would continue to set the agenda at senior school. Entry to senior school would occur only after post-compulsory age - that is 16 years or older and would be based on a distinct learning contract between the student (and his/her parents) and the school.

Junior school could concentrate on a quite different educational agenda with the 13- to 16 year-old students. Liberated from the Leaving Cert ethos, the focus could shift to the wider emotional, social, physical and aesthetic development of the child.

The objective of junior school would be one of building capability, that is providing opportunities for the child to achieve competence in a diversity of fields and to grow in self-confidence and self-esteem.

Such a change would have profound implications for the way in which teaching and learning happens in the early years of Irish second-level education.

It could mark the end of the subject-specific nature of teaching and learning as it is currently organised in a relatively rigid school timetable. Learning would be organised instead through simulated real-life situations, particularly through project-based learning.

There is a strong case for devolving the design of the junior school syllabus to the local school.

This would give teachers a much closer relationship to the syllabus; would allow for student involvement in developing the syllabus and provide for much greater synergy between the school and the wider local community.

The national focus within such a scenario would concern itself primarily with the attainment of clearly defined educational objectives, but would not prescribe how such objectives might be arrived at.

A learning objective for Irish, therefore, might simply be the achievement of oral proficiency in the subject. It would be the task of the school to develop its own unique approach to doing this and to design an assessment system showing that it had achieved it.

This kind of approach brings obvious benefits. It would address issues such as teacher stress and problems of student discipline and morale. It would engage students more fully in the life of the school and in their programme of study. It could transform the student-teacher relationship whereby the teacher becomes the facilitator of learning to a programme that is driven by an actively engaged student group.

While this approach to education is rare within the mainstream formal school system, it is not completely absent from it. The transition-year programme has given schools some experience of this kind of approach. Is is now time to build on this experience?

Prof Tom Collins is head of education at NUI Maynooth