Mr. Humphrey Jones:

To echo Mr. Christie's point, there is a lot to learn from the junior cycle. The last time I was in this forum, I spoke about how we need to learn a lot of lessons from the junior cycle and the quality of the curriculum that was produced there. Gladly, we have seen some improvements in the model that the NCCA has used. We saw something similar to this in the case of agricultural science, a leaving certificate science subject that was reformed in 2018 and first assessed in 2020. It introduced a similar experimental project to what is being proposed in biology, chemistry and physics. In the four years after it was introduced, from 2020 to 2024, we saw a 24% decrease in the number of students studying that subject. It went from about 8,000 to just under 6,000. It would be a significant worry if the number of students studying senior cycle science were to reduce to the same extent. We are not talking about 8,000 projects; we are talking about over 55,000 of these experimental projects having to be resourced and carried out in our schools every single year. If the number of students studying science drops by 10%, it will put a big dent in the Government's STEM education policy and the targets it has set for students studying STEM subjects.