Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I absolutely appreciate what the Deputy said. I am just making the point that there is more than €100 million, and €50 million again at the start of this year, specifically for digital side of technology and all of that. On the availability of particular traditionally gender-based subjects being made available, first, the Department is absolutely committed to resourcing these key subjects. This means, in the first instance, ensuring that we have the staff available to teach them. We currently run a number of upskilling programmes that ensure that staff who have a particular qualification and wish to take a further one in a particular area where there might be a challenge can do so; that is running very well. We are committed on an ongoing basis to reduce the pupil-teacher ratio, PTR, which again helps subjects that might have a smaller cohort uptake, but an uptake nonetheless. Whether that is in areas of physics, chemistry or whatever it might be, the reduced PTR actually helps to increase subject choice within a school. Where there is a specific difficulty that a school might have in not having staffing capacity to cover a particular subject, the Department engages directly on a one-to-one basis with the school and is prepared to assist it with whatever might be required, such as additional hours or whatever else.

I can acknowledge from my own experience that there was a time where subjects were very specific to gender. That is decreasing now because of the work we are seeing coming from the Department and the resourcing from the Department.

On the role of the inspectorate, it is very important and useful to us that we have the inspectorate having an oversight of patterns of uptake so that-----