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UNIONS HAVE CRITICISED the decision by the State Examinations Commission (SEC) to hold the Leaving Certificate oral exams during the Easter break as placing “unecessary” stress on students.
The oral examinations were moved to the Easter holiday period for the last two academic years. These exams were previously held during school term time either before or after the Easter break.
The SEC has now confirmed that the oral exams will take place in the first week of the Easter holiday period from Saturday, 23 March to Thursday, 28 March inclusive.
“The holding of the oral examinations during the Easter holidays, instead of during term time, assists in minimising disruption to teaching and learning in schools and in particular for those candidates preparing for their examinations,” the Department of Education said.
The president of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI), Geraldine O’Brien, said the examinations being held over the Easter break will place “additional and unnecessary stress on students”.
“It is vital that students get a break at Easter as this is their last opportunity to do so before they embark on their final preparations for the Leaving Cert exams,” O’Brien said.
“This point has already been raised by the students’ representative body the ISSU, as well as by students’ teachers. It is extraordinary that despite this, and despite commitments given to the ASTI regarding an extensive evaluation and engagement with stakeholders, the State Exams Commission is forging ahead,” she said.
The Irish Second Level Students Union (ISSU) has said today that it is “extremely disappointed” at the SEC’s decision.
“Students are put under undue pressure by taking the orals during Easter. This cuts into a deserved holiday period in which both students and teachers need to rest,” the union said.
The SEC is currently carrying out a detailed evaluation of the timing of oral exams into the future. It has commissioned research to explore parent, student, teacher, examiner and school leadership opinions about the timing of these exams.
“The SEC considered it was best to provide certainty now to the system and to students in relation to the 2024 oral examinations, so it has confirmed that they will take place during the Easter Holidays for this year,” the Department said.
According to the Department, the SEC found in its preliminary evaluation that “there were some challenges with the holding of the oral exams during the Easter Holidays due to the fact that students did not have access to normal term-time school support structures, such as their teachers”.
“In response, schools are being given additional funding for the Leaving Certificate oral examinations in 2024 to appoint a teacher to provide pastoral support to candidates, and ensure their attendance for the exam during the Easter holidays,” it said.
The SEC is to begin recruitment of Leaving Cert oral examiners for 2024 next week. The Department of Education said the rate of remuneration for oral examiners will again include a premium for examining over the Easter holidays, similar to last year.
This must be some kind of joke, right?
Crowd funding by it’s very nature is usually consumer-centric. So I would imagine this is a bad suggestion for a B2B SME. And a lot of SME’s in Ireland are B2B.
Is there a crowd funding platform out there that isn’t consumer-centric and is based on getting shares for investment?
You’re looking more at angel investor route there. You could also look at a co-destiny arrangement with significant customers. That is where there is extremely close cooperation between a service provider and a customer such that they are almost one (e.g. A well functioning outsourcing arrangement). In such a scenario, your customer may work with you and help you grow your business as the rate of return for spare funds in a bank is so poor at the moment.
Contact me on twitter if you have any questions and I can talk you through a few things if you want.
NEWFLASH FROM ERSI….Banks are shite, banks are shite!! Just whats needed…the out of touch preaching to the untouchables!!
The very fact that Dr?? Martina Lawless would suggest Crowdfunding as a viable option for anything over 1-2% of SMEs in Ireland shows her and her organisation’s detachment from reality…The ERSI is the place that needs to ‘catch up’ and give some real alternatives to the banking sewer that is the unavoidable staple for so many self-employed and SMEs in Ireland.
The idea of borrowing from tax-funded bailed-out banks so you can make money to pay them interest and pay more taxes on any profit you make to pay ad finites for their bail-out is insane!
Really? You seem to have a loose grasp on business there.
The options are very straight forward:
Bank loan: will seek concomitant funding and/or security over loan against personal assets. Benefit is funding / risk is losing it all.
Equity swap: in return for a capital injection from a private investor or investors, a business gets access to funding but loses some of its independence. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it does mean you pay an awfully high price for what can be a modest level of start-up funding if you become successful. It just depends on how confident you are about your business and how much you’re willing to relinquish to have a shot at success.
Co-destiny funding: two businesses share business expansion plans and without formally joining help each other realise each other’s expansion plans. One may have spare cash that they are willing to advance because of the close relationship for a reasonable return like 5%. The other gets the funding and can expand operations such that it can take on new customers and build the size and scale to be able to support their co-destiny partner’s business.
Flotation: alternative investment markets for products and service but this tends to be down the line.
Crowd-funding: raise small amounts of modest funding levels in return for equity or some kind of benefit in kind.
There aren’t too many other ways to do this beside merging and then losing independence. Sin é, that’s it. So there aren’t alternatives. Besides it’s not ESRI’s job to innovate, it is a SMEs job to find a way.
@robespierre. Your post is informative and succinct but I fear from its tone that you may give your advice from behind a desk(no offence meant and apologies if I am wrong). The options you speak of all infer a loss of independence to some degree and if you have worked, planned, saved, discussed ad nauseam every detail of your start up/expansion/survival, I fear the way you have delivered the options to finance in your post would not be so ‘clinical’. I have listened to many advisors who never took the ownership/self-employed plunge, and they all had answers from a book but never from experience unfortunately. Re ERSI, you are right, they are not the innovators, however may I suggest that they should just give the facts then, not opinion, and allow us, the innovators, to decide for ourselves without the gratuitous dog-on-the-street ‘advice’.
Nope, I left a well paid position in a tier one consultancy to run my own business. I am building from a modest base of my own savings and am running one business (an advisory one) to build the business I quit to set-up primarily through equity sharing with individuals I convince to take the jump with me.
The options are simple and few and that may seem clinical. Simple and easy are two very different things however.
Absolutely correct but when 50% have now website and a large amount of the other simply have a magazine sites crowd funding is like going to mars.
Ultimately it’s adapt or die. Micro financing and crowd sourcing or angel investors are a great bet but so many small businesses offer generic services without significant differentiation that this kind investment is not really relevant. On the product side crowd sourcing is easier and more obvious but generational mind sets can affect this.
Finally, as a small business owner, we’re right to be wary of banks. The first thing they look for is a personal guarantee or a hold over your family home. We’ve seen how that has worked out over the past 7 years.
My top tip is I give a 10% discount for half the money up front. It means I am guaranteed a break even level of cash. While you need loans / capital to expand and build scale without cash you have no business. Bird in the hand is very much my perspective.
It is called invoice discounting and service providers don’t do it enough. It’s harder for products but you may be able to do it on high volume order to reduce non payment risk and maintain adequate working capital reserves.
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