Ms Inez Bailey:

Yes. PwC was effectively the first non-education-based entity to apply a methodology to coming up with that figure and, consequently, that has driven huge investment across the Dutch Government and a number of its Departments, so it is not just the Dutch Department of Education, though it is playing the leading role, but a total of four Government Departments combining resources to address the issue in the Netherlands currently. It is an interesting comparison, considering the economy of the Netherlands in comparison to Ireland, but it is also taking place in a number of other countries as well. There is a kind of shift in terms of what needs to be done about this issue at a higher level.

In terms of numeracy, we have lower levels of awareness that there is something about numeracy impeding one's life, and certainly fewer people enter into services looking for numeracy support. In the context of what used to be called dyscalculia and was sometimes called dyscalculia, one of the issues is that, in order to get a diagnosis, people need to go to an educational psychologist. However, even if they get a diagnosis, this does not provide them with any additional supports. Many children are diagnosed with it. This does make a difference in terms of how they might learn. We find many parents are struggling with children who perhaps have that diagnosis but the parents do not necessarily know how to support them, and the children probably have a negative attitude to maths from a very young age, or that is our experience. We believe there is a usefulness in putting attention on numeracy as a subject in its own right, and perhaps there could be an awareness campaign specifically around this and around helping people to see how relatively important it is in one's life, and also that there are ways to do something about it.

With regard to the PISA-OECD test and the PIAAC tests, effectively, one is a test done in school when children are 15, so they are in an environment where they are used to sitting tests, whereas the PIAAC is based on taking a series of tests over the course of one hour when the adults involved are not used to being put through that format. They are effectively tests of real-life examples that would use people's literacy and numeracy skills. We would contend that despite the PISA scores, however high they might be, the gains are not being held as people become adults, given we now have people who are surveyed in PIAAC who would have been the population that was surveyed in the early stages of PISA. The OECD and, from what we can work out, all of the other stakeholders cannot explain why we have those two differences. It is, at least, cause for concern that it would not appear we are holding the gains that we have taken comfort from in the PISA tests in regard to the adult process.