| Popis: |
The experience of senior cycle in Ireland has been dominated by the Leaving Certificate Examination despite continued efforts since the 1960s to broaden the education experience beyond a narrow curricular focus on examinations. Since the 1980s, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment has been directly involved in these efforts, producing multiple papers, proposals and initiatives, and yet very little has fundamentally changed. The NCCA is a representative structure, based on a particular partnership model of policy development, and even though it is a policy space where curricular concerns are raised and negotiated by the partners in education, this cannot guarantee agreement on proposals as the recent disputes over junior cycle implementation can attest. In 2017, the NCCA embarked on a review of senior cycle education, designed to gather opinions and viewpoints from all the partners in education, including those not represented on the structures such as students. The NCCA worked with schools, teachers, parents and students along with other stakeholders to gather opinions on the aims and purpose of senior cycle and how it could develop to meet the needs of a diverse and changing society. This study aims to gather the perspectives of those involved in this review at various different levels, including an external policy view, and through a critical realist analysis of these discussions gain some insights into the characteristics and determinants of this partnership form of policy development and shed some light on the overt and covert influences on curricular reform in Ireland in order to better understand the processes at work. |
