EACH WEEKDAY EVENING, TheJournal.ie brings you five things you should know before you head out the door for the day.

1. #JUNIOR CERT: Education Minister Ruairí Quinn has announced unprecedented reforms of the junior certificate examination system with secondary school students now facing a longer series of continuous assessment in an attempt to make education between first and third year less focused on end-of-year exams.

2. #DEBT DEAL: The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, has said that Ireland should get a deal on its debt before 2013. Speaking in the Dáil today he said that leaders of the European Union need to follow up on their promise to break the link between Ireland’s bank debt and sovereign debt.

3. #DRILL BABY DRILL: The oil company Providence Resources has been granted a licence to drill an exploratory oil well off the coast of Dublin. The Department of Environment confirmed the granting of the license to drill off Dalkey, a move condemned by local TD Richard Boyd-Barrett who called for more scrutiny of the environmental impact it may have.

4. #IMMIGRATION: The number of non-Irish nationals living in Ireland has almost doubled in the last decade according to new figures from the Central Statistics Office. A total of 544,357 non-Irish nationals were living in the country in April 2011, up from 224,261 people in 2002.

5. #GROWING PAINS: If you are a child of the 80s then you might identify with plenty of these videos which perfectly sum up a childhood in this country in the pre-Celtic Tiger era. Watch out for the young Brian Cowen and the bad, bad kickboxing.