Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I have a few points about educators of our young STEM potential. A few things struck me. Thirty years ago, I ran a course across Europe for career guidance teachers at second level, which was run completely by female engineers, to try to address some of the gender bias that may have been there around the options students took. We are still talking about that. The informal set of competitions, some national, some local, etc., are wonderful and have been part of the landscape for decades. We are not sure what impact they are having. We need to maintain them but we are still giving out piecemeal funding, year in, year out, €2,000 here, €3,000 there, or 60% of what you need. We should make sure there is funding and if there is a really good idea, such as doing robotics with girl guides, that is fantastic, give them money to do it for five years and then do a proper evaluation, look at the impact, and perhaps fund it for another five years. We are sucking the lifeblood out of people who have huge goodwill regarding this agenda. Every year, we ask them to tell us again why it is a good idea and what company they have managed to convince to give them €500. We need to get serious about garnering momentum around sustaining it and evaluating it in a professionalised way.

Regarding primary educators, there is a lot going on. In DCU, there is an amazing Lego room student teachers work from and with. There is an amazing Minecraft room, which I think was mentioned earlier today. Strands of teachers are coming through specialising in STEM, the excitement around it, the basic competencies and the skills it develops. That is certainly happening. Maths capability was mentioned earlier. There are now approximately 8,000 young women leaving the secondary school system with a higher-level qualification in maths that would equip them to do engineering, while ten years ago, it was 4,000. Many of them are going into teaching because they may have set out to do higher level maths to get the points to get into teaching. We are not capitalising on that. Many young women, in particular, do not draw confidence from that maths ability. They have it but they do not use it to pick chemistry or engineering in third level. Equally, they do not put it in their backpack and take it into the classrooms they are teaching in and say to themselves, "I am good at maths", and "You can be good at maths", to their students.

As a country, we are quick to say we are good storytellers, artists etc., but we do not claim the ground that we are good at mathematics and the foundational-type skills needed for science like teamwork and all of those other areas. The change in the uptake of higher level maths is a huge opportunity for how we signal what is important in our teachers, particularly at primary level. I jumped around a little but I hope I spoke to some of the points.