Last night I was dealing with the quantity of work to be done in reorganising and completing our educational system and the amount of money which must be spent to achieve that. We have to make a thorough study of the present situation, discover the gaps in our system, and the future needs of the areas in which the Government must be prepared to take action. All this will involve a large expenditure and, because of that, the matter must be studied carefully. It is, in fact, being studied carefully at the moment. This is being done by a national team, the members of which are carrying out a survey and who will report this year. The title under which they are operating is "Total Investment in Education in Co-operation with OECD". The Commission on Higher Education have almost finished their deliberations. They expect to report this year. When we have the reports and recommendations from these two groups, we should have signposted quite clearly the direction in which our educational planning must go, the amount of money which will have to be spent, and the manner of its distribution.
In the meantime, as I have said, we have taken into our own hands the planning of what was obviously necessary. I did this by announcing last May a plan for post-primary education which, when fully in operation, will, I imagine, fill up many of the gaps in our system at the moment. Since last May, two committees have been working in the Department on the details. One has been working out revised programmes in the various curricula and the other is carrying out surveys of the areas in which comprehensive schools may be sited.
The Programme Planning Committee is far advanced. This planning involves planning for a new examination at the present intermediate certificate level which will be open to students from not alone secondary schools but from comprehensive and vocational schools as well. It will be, if you like, a comprehensive examination with a common core of subjects to which students may, according to their aptitudes and abilities, add subjects which are not at the moment on the intermediate certificate course. Planning, therefore, involves new curricula to suit and embrace the present secondary school programme, changes in the present vocational school programme, a lengthening of that programme by a year instead of the present two-year course, and a complete new idea in the form of the comprehensive schools to deal with the whole lot within their own walls.
The other committee have reached the stage where preliminary negotiations with the local interests involved have been entered into in regard to the placing and organisation of the comprehensive schools in certain areas. That comprehensive examination and curriculum will deal with the schoolchild up to the age of 15 to 16 years. The course for that examination will probably be a three-year course and the examination will be taken at from 15 to 16 years. There will be some who will not normally want to go further, but the educational openings for those who wish to go forward will be the academic type of course now available in secondary schools to the Leaving Certificate level.
There will have to be a change on the technical side because we do not have a corresponding limb in our vocational technical courses. A new involvement, therefore, will be a technical Leaving Certificate examination with a course leading to it. That will be for students in the 16 to 18 years range. This technical Leaving Certificate would be itself a means by which a student could get on to a higher technological course, whether in a higher technological college or a university. This extra technical course will be carried out mainly in new regional technical colleges. As I told the House yesterday, I visualise at the moment about ten of these colleges. In addition to the two centres in Dublin and the centres in Cork and Limerick, I mentioned Waterford, Galway, Dundalk, Sligo, Athlone and Carlow as places which seem to me suitable. They seem suitable to me because of the results of the surveys we have carried out.