The Department of Education will no longer have day-to-day responsibility for exams, special-needs education and third-level colleges under a reform package outlined yesterday by the Minister, Dr Woods.
As reported in The Irish Times last month, the Department is to set up an independent exams body to run the Junior and Leaving certificates. A network of regional offices will be set up to reduce the administrative burden on the Department's officials in Dublin.
The regional offices will be the "first point of contact" with the Department for schools, said Dr Woods, who received Cabinet approval for the changes this week.
Services for children with disabilities will be taken over by a new body called the National Council for Special Education, which will have the power to arrange special education provisions at local level.
Dr Woods said the Higher Education Authority (HEA) would have its remit extended to include the funding and co-ordination of "all publicly funded third-level colleges". This move was welcomed yesterday by the chairman of the HEA, Dr Don Thornhill.
The HEA's ambit already extends to the seven universities, but the institutes of technology and the DIT will now be added. "It has long been accepted that a single body to co-ordinate and fund all third-level institutions is needed in the higher education sector," said Dr Woods.
Many of the changes arise from a report on the Department's operations and performance by retired civil servant Mr Sean Cromien.
He met Department officials and found they were unable to develop policy properly as they were overburdened with small-scale operational matters. Dr Woods said this was because the Department was too centralised.
The new exams body is likely to be the most controversial change. Independent exams bodies have run into problems in Northern Ireland and Scotland in recent years. Because of the large number of students involved, any mistakes or errors tend to be magnified.
Dr Woods said staging the exams posed an enormous logistical challenge annually for the Department.
"They involve the preparation of over 300 different test instruments with a print run of 22 million pages. These are provided to 130,000 candidates in over 4,500 examination centres. In all, over two million examination components (written, aural/oral, practicals and projects) are marked, leading to the issue of almost one million examination grades," he said.
The creation of an exams commission with "operational responsibility" for the running of the exams would bring Ireland into line with international practice and focus the Department on assessment, policy and evaluation, he said.
"The precise timing of this transfer of responsibility will be related to the completion of the detailed planning and consultative arrangements which will now be set in train."
It is understood that the commission will have the power to recruit supervisors and examiners. They will not necessarily have to be teachers, although teachers will be given priority.