Ms Beth O'Reilly:

I thank the Chairman and members of the joint committee for this opportunity to participate in the discussion on the future of STEM in Irish education. My name is Beth O’Reilly and I am president of the Union of Students in Ireland, US, the national representative body for third level students in Ireland. We have consulted with our member organisations from third level students’ unions across Ireland to prepare for this discussion.

As we look to the future, STEM will continue to play a critical role in Ireland’s economic and social development. With the growth of the tech industry, Ireland has become a tech hub for major players like Google, Facebook and Microsoft. This has led to increased demand for skilled STEM professionals in fields such software engineering, data science and cybersecurity. Despite this increased demand, the Minister for Further and Higher Education warned in June of 2021 that there were skills shortages in key STEM industries like IT and engineering. To continue to meet the demand, Ireland must continue to invest heavily in STEM education and training. After the warning of the skills shortages, several initiatives were aimed at increasing the number of STEM graduates including the addition of 10,000 free spaces on almost 300 Springboard+ courses to allow learners to upskill in cybersecurity, virtual reality, health innovation and logistics.

Ireland's STEM policy aims to foster the development of a highly skilled workforce to enhance Ireland's image as a top education and training environment for all Europeans, to facilitate entry into career fields related to STEM, and to promote the development of computational thinking and digital skills. However, there is still room to further increase our levels of STEM education and, in that context, USI is calling for a number of measures, including increasing funding for STEM education, encouraging diversity in STEM fields, creating a culture of inclusivity in STEM, working towards unconscious bias training, increasing the availability of degree programmes, increasing access to STEM, improving student retention rates, supporting apprenticeships and vocational training programmes and increasing PhD funding.