Mr. Tony Donohoe:

I was going to take that question from Deputy Thomas Byrne but Dr. O'Sullivan has described it very well. It is not that we are emphasising one over the other. It is just that the system as it stands puts a huge emphasis on recall of knowledge. There is an old truism in education policy about the assessment tail wagging the curriculum dog, and that is what tends to happen. It has an influence on teaching practice and what is valued in the classroom.

In terms of the baccalaureates, I have not seen any objective assessments of it but I have heard within higher education that people who have come through the baccalaureates perform well. They are more liable to be strong, independent learners than people who might have gone to cramming schools in particular and might have performed well on the points but struggle when they get into higher education, whereas the baccalaureates provides a more rounded educational experience.

I will take some of Deputy Madigan's questions. On whether bonus points for mathematics worked, it definitely worked up to a point as it has almost doubled the percentage of people opting for the higher level paper. Has it improved mathematics standards? Probably not, and it was never designed to do that. Approximately 15% of young people take the higher level mathematics papers. By way of comparison, for English it is nearer to 70%, so there was a perception that mathematics was very difficult. It probably is but it was to incentivise people to take up the subject and also to compensate them for the huge amount of work that went into it. Those of us who advocated for this did not believe it would improve standards. Teaching and curriculum, like all education policies, is down to two fairly simple elements, namely, what we teach and how we teach it. It was around improving the competency of mathematics teachers, many of whom were out of field, in other words, they might have done mathematics as an element of another subject such as commerce, so it is important to develop their skills on which there was a lot of work.

There was also Project Maths, which was a very ambitious curriculum reform.

It will be formally evaluated now; it has just gone through the complete cycle. From a business point of view, it was conceptually the right way to go because it located maths in context. Project maths puts a huge emphasis on problem-solving.

At all levels of the education system, I find languages to be the most intractable education policy challenge. I cannot think of anything that is more difficult to address. Ireland is an anglophone country. We will have to address the issue for a lot of reasons. We have never really developed an indigenous business sector and have tended to rely on foreign direct investment. That is because businesses tended not to look too far beyond the UK when it came to exporting. Brexit could change that. It will not change it overnight but we will have to diversify markets and language acquisition and cultural awareness will be an important part of that. We have been waiting years for a languages strategy from the Department. We tend to look at languages in a very piecemeal way. The committee asked what languages we should be learning. That is always an issue. I remember about 30 years ago trying to persuade the Government that we should be teaching Japanese. It was put on the curriculum. The Japanese economy went down the tubes at the time but it is still on the curriculum. I have included in my submission some of the considerations that might inform the choice of languages. The important point is to look at the connections between languages. There is an idea that if one learns a language, it is easier to learn a second. There are missed opportunities regarding Irish. We could have another debate about Irish and its place on the curriculum. There is a missed opportunity there. The way we teach languages is not optimal. It is a challenge with which every English-speaking country struggles.