Extra Time in State Exams for Students with Dyslexia and Dyscalculia: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2025-11-12 ============================================================ Martin Conway (IND), Administrative Panel I commend Senator Curley on taking the initiative and tabling this critically important motion. I am sorry to have to say it but the State Examinations Commission's special arrangements for people with disabilities are not fit for purpose. I did my leaving certificate in 1992 and I got extra time of ten minutes per hour because of my vision impairment. I typed my exam. I missed getting into UCD by ten points. Back then there was no higher education access route, HEAR, programme so you had to get the points. I repeated the leaving certificate the following year and used a word processor. I got ten minutes per hour. Because of the fact that I read so little, I spell phonetically, so I had to run a spellcheck which took about 20 minutes of the 30 minutes I got for a three-hour exam. I got the points, thankfully, and went to college. In college the approach was very different. They took account of the fact that I spelled phonetically and gave me 20 minutes per hour. I prospered in college because of that particular provision. Let us fast-forward to 2025. That Senator Curley has to table this motion is an indictment of the Department of education. To be quite frank, for whatever reason, the Department of education does not want to change culturally. It has a culture of constantly pushing back when it comes to State examinations for people with disabilities. I know of two twins who had the exact same condition. The State Examinations Commission gave special accommodations to one and refused to for the other even though there was absolutely no difference between their two conditions. That happened only a few years ago. The Department pushes back. That it does not want to change and does not appreciate the fact that everybody deserves to play on an equal, fair and balanced playing pitch is absolutely reprehensible. I do not know who the people in charge of special accommodations in the State Examinations Commission are but, up until a year or two ago, they have should hung their heads in shame. I do not have a huge amount of faith in this pilot scheme but people like Senator Curley, Senator Nelson Murray and the rest of the people who have spoken on this will push to make sure this happens. The one hope and the one positive in this is that I know the Minister is committed to making her Department change. If it does not want to, she will make it. She has proven time and again that she is a Minister who leads from the front. Senator Scahill is right. For 14 years, we have had a mixture of Labour Party, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Ministers for education who have experienced pushback from their Department. It is now time for a powerful push to make the Department change so that this pilot scheme will be the last and that, from here on in, if people have impairments, dyslexia or another disability that means they need a little bit of extra time to put on paper or onto a computer or to speak the knowledge they have, we should provide that. We should not be having this discussion here. We should be doing what other countries are doing and what the universities are doing. For whatever reason, however, we have had to fight to get digitally accessible exam papers for the leaving certificate. It was only for last summer's June exams that people who studied using a laptop because of their disability were finally able to access their exams in a digital format. By God almighty, it was desperate that we had to campaign for years and years. I acknowledge Féach and other organisations that did huge work in that regard. I also acknowledge Niamh Kilcawley, the student in Dungarvan, County Waterford, who could not do her junior certificate using the digital formats she had studied and learnt through. She was able to do her leaving certificate through that format last June. She is now studying law in UCC. She was able to achieve her potential because she was able to do her exam in the format in which she had studied and learnt. The State Examinations Commission has to get real. The Minister might think I am being harsh but I have been a Member of the Oireachtas for 14 years lobbying, putting down Commencement matters, raising matters on the Order of Business and speaking on Private Members' motions and remembering my own experience back in the nineties. It is very frustrating that it has only changed slightly. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-11-12/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:18+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-11-12