Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister and her officials for being here today. I apologise if I repeat questions because I was at the health committee next door. I promise to be less robust here than I was next door.

It is such an interesting area because education has such an informative role in culture. As Senator Higgins said, this is not just education or career preparation, it is about culture. We had a very powerful engagement with Jennifer’s Poole’s brother, Jason Poole. She was the victim of gender-based violence and was tragically killed. Her murderer was recently sentenced. Mr. Poole is a teacher and talked about the toxic culture that develops among young men and the things that they say. Sometimes those all-male environments are places where we need to empower young men to call out that toxic environment.

It can be a really difficult thing to be a young teenage boy. We have to understand the place that the young man might be in when he is among a group of people. There might be just one individual engaging in it, but for other young men in that group to have the strength to step out of the mould and to call out that behaviour is very difficult. I am interested to hear what the Department is considering in trying to tackle that culture. We can do it in GAA clubs and soccer clubs, but there is also a role in schools and all-male schools are one environment where that happens. I am particularly interested in that.

The second area is male representation in the teaching profession. The last time I looked at numbers for primary school level only 14% of the teaching profession was male. That says something to both young girls and young boys in primary school. I was at a fantastic event yesterday in Erin's Isle GAA club where Dublin City University launched a programme to try to increase diversity in the teaching profession by including more young people from disadvantaged areas applying for teaching, particularly primary school teaching. The point made by DCU was that their diversity adds to the overall strength of the profession. With men being only 14% of the teachers at primary school level, the teaching profession is weaker because men are under-represented, in the same way as many other professions, and perhaps far more professions, are weaker because of the under-representation of women. The issue is that balance in teaching.

The last issue is subject choice. St. Mary's Secondary School in my constituency heard that I was a member of this committee and for one of their CSPE projects the students wrote to me asking me about gender equality and about subject choice, in particular. What was interesting was that they did not have enough male teachers in the school to get a good sample of data regarding whether male teachers had been impacted. That is interesting because it ties back to the last conversation. They also were not able to engage with male students because their school is an all-female school. At the very basic level of them trying to gather the data to tackle an issue, they ran into the first problem all of us encounter, which is that they did not have the opportunity to engage. Young women in an all-female school with very limited choices in science - that is some of them but there are obviously others such as woodwork and so forth - are seeking to tackle gender inequality and they run up against the first hurdle of not being able to access people of a different gender. It is such an example, and I give them credit.

Will the Minister comment on subject choices, the balance in the teaching profession and the toxic culture that often exists and what we can do in education to call it out?