Minister called on to complete reform of college grants system

THE Minister for Education should "finish the job" of reforming the third-level grants system, according to the president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors.

Father John Dunne said Ms Breathnach should complete the process of creating a system which was fair and accessible.

"This was what Christina Murphy was about in her work, but the task is not finished," he said.

He was speaking at the second day of the Higher Options conference in the RDS in Dublin, at which a minute's silence was observed for Ms Murphy, a duty editor of The Irish Times and the editor of Education & Living, who died on Sunday.

Father Dunne said that although progress had been made, there were still many differences in the operation of the grants scheme from county to county.

Two years ago, a government committee recommended the centralisation of the various schemes under one agency, but this has not been implemented. The committee also proposed that grant applicants be assessed on the basis of their parents' assets as well as income, but strong opposition from the farming sector stymied this suggestion.

Father Dunne said the procedures used by UK colleges for recognising Leaving Certificate grades varied considerably. With rising numbers of students leaving the Republic to study in Britain, there was a need to standardise these procedures.

He also called for the greater use of databases to provide students with details about Irish courses. Ecctis 2000, a database containing up-to-date information on 100,000 courses at over 900 UK colleges, was on display at the exhibition yesterday, but there is no equivalent concentrating solely on Irish institutions.

The Leaving Certificate should be reformed to make more provision for continuous assessment, he added. "But in spite of its flaws, the Leaving Cert is the best we have. People have learned to live with it as a fairly good way of assessing students for third level."

The conference, organised jointly by The Irish Times and the Institute of Guidance Counsellors, was attended yesterday by more than 6,000 students and counsellors. It closes today.