Ms Moira Leydon:

We are all looking at the clock but it would be unfortunate if we did not address the issue of STEM which Senator Warfield raised. There is good news and bad news on that. Industry drives much of the policy for education. We need to be quite explicit sometimes. There is good knowledge that what drives STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering and maths - is the imagination and aesthetic appreciation. It is implicit rather than explicit and perhaps policy needs to reflect that. The good news is that we have an arts strategy for education. It is being driven by the very eminent educationalist who has done us all wonderful public service over the decades, Professor John Coolahan, and is being funded by the Government. The bad news, which is endemic, is that when a school has an art teacher, he or she is within the pupil-teacher ratio. One of the big issues we have, which is particularly apparent in rural schools, is that there is a rigid pupil-teacher ratio. That means that when there are a particular number of pupils, the school gets a particular number of teachers. The evidence is very strong that art and music are slowly but surely dropping off the curriculum. Schools have to provide 35 subjects so it has to get the teachers who teach the mainstream subjects. It is very hard for schools to appoint teachers whose degree is primarily in art. I am a great believer in putting forward practical proposals. We need to be able to give concessionary allocations to schools to allow them to appoint art teachers which will allow many more students to avail of this very enriched form of education. It will be particularly enriched with the new syllabus that is coming in. We need to look at sharing teachers between schools, which they do very successfully in primary schools. It is not rocket science. We have a fantastic precedence of sharing resource and learning support teachers and we have a little bit of that at second level. There is no reason why we could not look at models of sharing art teachers. In a typical first-year intake in a second level school of about 120 pupils, there might be 28 doing art which will drop after junior certificate. It is very sad, given the fantastic cultural richness in this country. I would be very pleased to talk to the Senator afterwards. There is good news but the allocation is killing it and we need to look at that.