Dr. Ruth Freeman:

The STEM subjects for the leaving certificate are subject to the same general issues that we have all talked about this morning, namely, rote learning and the regurgitation of facts in the final summit of exams. Through the work that has been done in Dublin City University and other places, we can see that there is a good opportunity to bring in that inquiry base in respect of the STEM subjects. As experimentation, by its very nature, is in the STEM subjects, we can bring that in.

The general issues, however, remain in STEM. We have discussed the idea of portfolios of work and teamwork. We need to start bringing those aspects into the formal assessment processes.

We can think about recognising the learning and informal education outside of schools. I wish to reference things like SciFest, BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, and the CanSat competition. There are also things like Model United Nations, where students undertake to do teamwork and presentation work. We have some very strong activities in Ireland with which we could build more formal partnerships in terms of the education system and we could think about how we can make sure that all schools have access to those kinds of extracurricular activities and that they are incentivised and enabled for schools. We can do that.

In terms of STEM, and I think Ms Costello referred to this, we need people to go and access data. We can all get data by typing into the Internet now. What we need to do is teach people the scientific method. I mean how to set up an experiment, analyse data, assess the information generated by the experiment and generate a hypothesis.

Those are core skills that will be addressed across the whole curriculum.

When it comes to teachers, our CPD interventions are primarily at primary school level. We can probably extrapolate from some of the lessons there, however. We need to incentivise teachers to do CPD courses. It is not formally recognised if they do CPD through SFI. Most of the CPD in the primary system, perhaps understandably, focuses on numeracy and literacy. Those are clearly core skills we want people to come out of school with. Our focus is on inquiry-based learning and supporting teachers who do not have the confidence in STEM to teach STEM for those early years. We have to put in place backfilling and make it possible for teachers. Teachers have a busy curriculum and they work hard. We have to be realistic about what they can do. When we bring in these interventions, we need to make sure that they can work in the context of the school working day for teachers.