Towards a Better Future

Towards a Better Future: A Review of the Irish School System
with curriculum development, and/or are likely to require ongoing support and training to enable
them to design and implement their own programmes.
Online Portal
In addition to delegating responsibility to teachers for developing and customising the curriculum,
the new approach and rationale places a heavy reliance on the NCCA’s online portal
(www.curriculumonline.ie). The portal provides opportunities for teachers to share ideas, sample
lesson plans, resources, and suggestions and the clipboard function of the portal allows teachers to
customise the curriculum for classroom use.
While an online portal has undoubted potential as a source of exciting and innovative resources for
teachers and learners, undue reliance on an online portal can be problematic. There are likely to be
some teachers who are less than comfortable with accessing the web, and it should be borne in
mind that significant problems of online access still exist, especially in rural areas of Ireland. A survey
carried out in May 2016 by Amárach found that a third of people living outside the five largest
cities of Ireland say that slow and unreliable internet speeds currently prevent them from working
from home and that internet speed is not fast enough for their family requirements (RTE.ie/news).
From this, we can take it that a significant number of teachers do not have adequate access to
www.curriculumonline.ie and to other web-based teaching and learning resources, which is likely
to militate against their ability to undertake lesson planning at home in the evenings and at weekends.
There can also be difficulties in accessing the internet in some schools. Although the DES has
indicated that all schools have been provided with the technology to enable them to connect with
the internet, problems with broadband access remain. A survey of 60 Science and Mathematics
education students in University College Cork, carried out in March 2016, found that only 10% of
them taught in schools in which the access to the internet in their classroom teaching was very
reliable. 60% reported that they frequently encountered difficulty with internet access and 30%
reported that they rarely use online resources due to the great difficulty in accessing the internet in
their schools. While this was not a representative sample, nor does it claim to be so, it is nevertheless
indicative of the real-life, on the ground experience of student teachers in the southern part of the
country (Kennedy, 2016).
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