Ms Evelyn O'Connor:

The Minister answered a parliamentary question this week relating to what has been achieved under our foreign languages strategy so that will be available to Deputies. We gave quite a detailed response with regard to that. Coming back to STEM, we agree that it is a very important issue and we certainly want to see greater uptake of STEM by females. However, we also want to see more males taking up STEM as well. As Mr. Tattan mentioned, we established a gender balance group to advise us regarding how we can improve gender balance in STEM. This group has representation from industry, higher education, parents and students. Among others, DCU is also a member of the group. The starting point of that group was to review what literature was available.

The idea was to see what interventions have been tried and tested, what works and what does not. This was all done to help us see and recognise what challenges and barriers there are which prevent females and indeed males from taking up science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the STEM subjects. A report was published going back, in fact, to last November which provides the outcome on that. In short, a key finding was that no single intervention will achieve gender equity. Rather, there is a requirement to support multiple interventions addressing different segments of the ecosystem to effect the change that was required. As a next step, we set up an expert group to review the report and to check to see what we could do going forward. That review and report is going to be with the Minister shortly and we would expect the Minister to publish those recommendations.

As a next step, under our overall policy statement, which goes from 2017 to 2026, we will be developing a new implementation plan under that statement, and the actions coming out of the gender balance group will feed into that, among many other recommendations on other issues in STEM. Shortly and possibly tomorrow, we will be going out on a public consultation on our next implementation plan. We would welcome the views of Deputies on that and would hope to have that published somewhere around 2022 or possibly going into the next school term.