Mr. John Curtis:

The supply issue is interesting. We all do surveys around where the shortages are and we give the information to the Department for it to look through. Many of our teachers teach out-of-field subjects. That is one of the issues to which Deputy Conway-Walsh referred. A mathematics class might be taught by a teacher who is not qualified in the area. That can percolate across the system and sometimes makes it difficult to have definitive figures as to what is going on. We are doing more work in that regard, as is the Department. As we move into senior cycle reform, the more empirical data we have to help us in that field, the better. There is work going on in that sphere.

In my opening statement, I mentioned the number of resources available. STEM subjects are resource heavy. I am thinking of laboratories, science rooms, equipment and things like that. We have never looked at how to manage that properly. In some of these classes, we are dealing with a lower pupil-teacher ratio, PTR. Schools need extra resources to have some of these subjects in place. Systemically, we need to look at that to see how we can offer support in this area. The work we are doing on senior cycle reform will allow us to get more insight into what we want to do, going forward. Much of it comes back to helping us at school level. We know that principals and guidance counsellors would love to spend time, if they had it to spare, looking at the implications of some of this research. Many schools are putting some work into improving STEM education.

The school self-evaluation, SSE, model will allow schools to do that. We probably need to do a little bit of work around that to prompt schools to look at this area more but at the moment there is still that little bit of emergency mode in schools around catching up and getting out of where we are. A recalibration is starting to take place where we are starting to look to the future. It is a good time to come back and look at STEM and see what we can do. We always make this plea when we are in here talking to the politicians. It goes back to the percentage of the national pie that we get in education financially. Mr. Irwin, Dr. Gormley and I will have different views as to how that money would be spent, as would the Department officials and the Minister and her officials, but if we got a bigger proportion of the pie the likes of ourselves, with the officials and the Minister's people, could be trusted to work out how best to spend it. There is that deficit there. The point I would always make is that we have one of the most highly respected education systems in the world but the OECD figures consistently tell us we are underinvesting. Why is that?