IN 1913 Patrick Pearse wrote in The Murder Machine that the work of the first Minister for Education in a free Ireland would be to bring order out of chaos. For Seamus Puirseil, the acting director of the National Council for Educational Awards, the first report of Teastas, the interim Irish National Certification Board, threatens to undo that system of order at third-level.
"I cannot believe that the Minister would be so foolish - and her record indicates that she would not - as to introduce structures which would bring chaos to an orderly third-level system," he says.
The publication of the Teastas report last week drew a guarded response from the Minister for Education but an undisguisedly hostile reaction from the NCEA and the DIT, among others. Elsewhere in the extra-university third-level sector, which is one of the areas of responsibility proposed for Teastas, there is also likely to be caution over the radical changes to the sector proposed in the report.
The NCEA and the DIT in particular view the Teastas report as disastrous. It effectively proposes the abolition of the former while the DIT, struggling for independence, looks set to fall from the frying pan of the Department of Education's control into the fire of Teastas dominance.
"It isn't a case of guarding territory," says Puirseil. "The NCEA has been involved in this area of quality assurance and is committed to it. What we are very concerned about is that the same standards would apply, that wherever you get an award that award stands up and we think that can best be achieved in the system we have in place."
The ckairman of the Teastas Board, Dick Langford, says that the implementation of the Teastas proposals will be handled "sensitively" and that "will be done in the context of protecting the currency and credibility of existing qualifications".
The Teastas report proposes that the NCEA and the National Council for Vocational Awards should be reconstituted as sub-boards of Teastas. Crucially, the report notes it is "neither desirable nor necessary" that these sub-boards should be permanent in an effort to ensure that there is no differentiation between the different levels and types of education and training.
The issue of distinguishing between education and training - effectively the distinction between third-level and more general vocational qualifications - is a contentious one. "What we have are distinctly third-level qualifications and this is a matter of great concern, particularly to our designated institutions, says Puirseil. His view is that Teastas, in its efforts to designate a much wider range of qualifications, could blur that distinction between third-level, second-level and vocational qualifications, with disastrous results for future graduates and those already holding qualifications.
Langford's view is that eliminating these distinctions between sectors is essential if progression through a lifelong learning system is to be achieved. He believes that, with demographic changes, access, mobility and transfer will become crucial to the education system. The university sector, which lies outside Teastas's remit, will also have to play its part. "It will become much easier to facilitate the freeflow between the university and extra-university sector and this is a freeflow which will work both ways," he says.
That the report has received no welcome from the DIT is hardly surprising, since it ties the DIT to the extra-university sector for the present and means that the degree-awarding powers announced last year by the Minister will be subject to approval by Teastas. Dr Brendan Goldsmith, President of the DIT, described the report as "unacceptable" and said it was not what the Institute had been anticipating.
Actually, the DIT had certainly been aware of the possible implications of Teastas some time. DIT representatives had met with the Teastas and had worked on the assumption that the DIT would not be involved with Teastas; but the RTC sector in particular was extremely unhappy at the possibility that DIT would somehow elude the new board. This would effectively have created a two-tier system within the technological education sector, to the detriment of the RTCs.
Meanwhile, the DIT stepped up its campaign for inclusion under the terms of the Universities Bill. When the Minister announced shortly before Christmas that university status was not to be, but that the Institute would be accorded degree-awarding powers, the DIT's fate was sealed.
Last week in the Dail she confirmed this impression, pointing out "there seems to be a particular hang-up that the word university grants an institution status" and refusing the support a PD amendment which would have granted DIT university status within three years.
From a first impression, the RTC sector is likely to be one of the main beneficiaries of Teastas. The board recommends the establishment of a single RTC awards body to act on behalf of the RTCs, with a statutory basis for the body to be established in the longer term
This gives the RTCs a degree of autonomy which they have long sought. Dr Sean McDonagh, chairman of the Council of Directors of RTCs, says it will give the RTCs "ownership of the awards and ownership of the quality procedures in the colleges". Pointedly, he also expressed satisfaction with the "binary" system created by the DIT's inclusion.
Legislation on Teastas is unlikely to be forthcoming until late this year or early 1998, as the Universities Bill is still making its tortuous way through the Oireachtas.
