Mr. Paul O'Hara:

I will address Senator Daly's questions on education. When we first started Roots of Empathy we demonstrated it in a school in Killinarden in Tallaght. The demonstration was attended by 30 key stakeholders from all sectors but the only negative voice was that of the Department of Education and Skills. It did not want to see the programme happen, which only emboldened us to ensure it did. Part of the challenge for the Department was that by endorsing the programme it would have to make it available to all schools. It is ridiculous that it cannot simply pilot the programme in a smaller context.

Tom Collins, who was then chairman of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, was also involved in the Ashoka network. It became clear that the curriculum is cluttered and pressurised. My mother is a primary school principal. The system is good at adding new subjects - we are partly to blame for that with Roots of Empathy and other initiatives - but it takes real courage to remove subjects. The problem is that we keep adding to the curriculum when we should be starting from scratch to identify the skills our children need for the 21st century. The skillset they need is totally different from the one we learned but if they do not get these new skills, they will not be players in society as it evolves. The rate of change is so fast that unless they have certain critical skills they will not be players. We need to take a bottom-up approach.

We have started at university level by cultivating change making campuses. DCU is our first change making campus. Our next step will be cultivating change making schools. We will identify ten schools at first to see if we can cultivate a culture of change making in primary and secondary schools as a demonstration of what is possible for the rest of the education system.