Mr. David Byrne:

One of the prominent tools we could have in defeating stereotypes is familiarity, and I do not see boys and girls achieving that familiarity with each other when they are put into separate schools. The point has already been made very well by my colleagues from the ISSU in that regard, including the available curricula and that kind of thing.

There is the question of the delivery of relationships and sexuality education, RSE, which must be connected across all levels of education. It is a little slipshod currently and it would be very beneficial to have primary inform post-primary and that could in turn inform third level. There was a very good point as well about the content of the training available. An aspect that arose in my research was the kind of overlap between subjects such as social, personal and health education, SPHE, RSE and science. The biology of reproduction, puberty and things like that would have been covered in those subjects. The responses indicate students were kind of clocking out of RSE when it came to the biological stuff. I agree there should be more of an emphasis on the softer, more tacit and difficult to address areas such as the stereotypes and that kind of thing.

Many of the points made about reviewing the wider curriculum are reflective of the hidden curriculum again. Opening a textbook in English, a student is met with a kind of stereotypical representation of women, African people or the other examples that have been mentioned. Again, that should precipitate a review. There seems to have been a bit of progress in that regard but we are not quite there yet.

On the content of SPHE, students must be involved with developing the curriculum and identifying the areas that need to be addressed and that kind of thing. One of the ways we could address that is to incorporate research into the curriculum and have students involved in what is called participatory action research. Students can do the research themselves. They can do a survey of how they are feeling about RSE at the beginning and end of the year to see if RSE has any impact on how they feel, including about the curriculum. They can conduct research projects on what issues may arise from them inside and outside the school. There are a host of different things we can do in that regard, but again it is about teaching teachers how to do this and supporting students in identifying these matters.

I agree the answer is not separation. If there are boys and girls in the same class and the boys are dominating, we need to expect teachers to stay on top of it but we must also support them. It can be exceptionally difficult and boys will be boys in that sense, I guess. They will try to dominate the class and while we are still trying to educate them out of that trend, we must support teachers so they can manage the classroom in that regard. That could be subsumed into training before service and through continuing professional development, I guess.