Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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I thank our witnesses for the information they have shared with us this morning. While I was reading the submission last night, I was having a think about this. Naturally, you think about your own schooling, when many of us were first exposed to physics, although I have a cousin who is a physicist who tells me that physics is all around us so we have been exposed to it since we were babies. However, in truth, we do not think about it until we are presented with that choice. In my case, it was a choice between physics and history and history won out but, if I am honest, I do not think I was any great loss to the world of physics.

I have a question on negative stereotyping. When I was at school, which is a very long time ago now, certain subjects were for the lads and not for the girls while certain subjects were for maths nerds and not the sporty people and so on. There is a kind of negative stereotyping at play. The same thing happens with apprenticeships. It is mentioned in the presentation that this kind of negative stereotyping exists and we know about it because it is all around us but will the witnesses outline anything they feel would be key in tackling these issues to ensure that more people come to these decisions with the kind of open mind I did not have? For us, if we wanted to go to college, we had to maximise our points and focus on the things we might be good at. We were not to go down the road of learning for the sake of learning. It was all about focus. A good bit of work has been done, although there is more to do, in ridding apprenticeships of the negative stereotypes associated with them, although they are still there. It is the same thing with physics. What can we do? What are the easy things to do and what are the more systemic actions that could be taken?