Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I could hear the bells ringing in the background for the Leader of the Seanad to get in. It was great that she got an opportunity to speak. I was excited when I saw that the witnesses were coming in because it is very close to my heart. To be fair to the Minister, Deputy Foley, she was talking about schools putting themselves forward for a pilot.

I think she believes there is a commitment to roll it out across the board. I wanted to say that first. Having said that, it struck me that if our guests are finding a certain section are not putting themselves forward then, in the same way as when we are looking for women to run for election, you must find people and bring them with you. Even in pilot programmes there must be a sense in which WRI reaches out to those schools that are not putting themselves forward if there is not a proper representation. It is important to put on record the Minister was talking about a pilot there and not that it would not be rolled out everywhere. There is obviously a difficulty, no matter what Department you are in, with your ambition not matching the pace of what can be achieved. I am also frustrated with the pace of things.

I speak quite a lot about the importance of mentorship in education. It does not happen enough. Especially in these kinds of areas around innovation and research, we need to have innovation and, therefore, it almost has to be cutting-edge. It cannot be based on an education system that can sometimes creak at the seems. I would love to hear what our guests think about having more partnerships. Leaving certificate reform is one part of that but it goes right through primary, secondary and tertiary partnerships so we constantly have, as some guests touched on earlier, people in front of you who are actually doing it, so you can really imagine yourself in that role. We say that about politics quite a lot but it is the same across the board. It is about what that might look like in schools. I am also on the education committee and we are doing work similar enough to some of the work we are talking about here. An awful lot of the other questions have been covered but I thank our guests for their passion. It is important to have passion in these rooms. It motivates all of us as well.