Mr. David Byrne:

Mandatory training would be a very positive step forward. Going back to the Senator’s first point on the toxic masculinity that is still evident in the classroom for, say, male-dominated subjects, it will be a very long road. Hopefully, however, through appropriate education with a societal component - because as the Senator said, it is cultural too - beginning in primary or even before, we need to teach boys to not be that way. Addressing it in education would be a good start. We need to teach them that there is another way of behaving. It really is that simple and yet it is also extraordinarily complex.

It would be very difficult to break that mould because it is such an ingrained habit.

As regards training, making the training mandatory would be beneficial in two ways, as I mentioned. First, we could ensure that people delivering the SPHE and RSE curriculums would be, at least, more comfortable delivering and speaking about sensitive topics because they would have had training. At the moment, we find that many teachers have had no training or preparation; they just have free hours and are being slotted in to SPHE. That is part of the trend of people attending to other matters or doing paperwork while students are doing their homework. Training would be of significant benefit in terms of comfort. It should be mandatory to be certified to deliver SPHE. That should ensure that people who are not trained will not be allowed to deliver SPHE and only people who are able to deliver RSE will do so. It is a significant issue. I could not agree more. That is one way we could gather around that problem.

We have already seen that RSE and SPHE are very much valued. Teachers consider them to be important but when it comes to the crunch, they are very much devalued in comparison with the core curriculum. When there are time constraints and there is a choice in respect of emphasising one or the other, teachers will usually emphasise the core curriculum. Making it mandatory and having people who are dedicated to this curriculum will help to improve the value of the well-being curriculum, let us say, as compared with the core curriculum.