Dr. Ruth Freeman:

At its heart, Science Foundation Ireland is very focused on the idea that everyone has a right to have access to STEM skills. As I said before, a lot of the challenges we face as a society will, at least, involve conversations about STEM. We have had loads of conversations over the past 18 months. We are all armchair scientists now. We have embedded in our programmes the idea of access and reaching those who do not have the same science capital that maybe the more privileged in society have. That is a fundamental objective of our discover programme.

When we put in place initiatives to break down those barriers or open doors, they are often focused on those less-privileged communities. In fact, our science in Ireland barometer survey, which we run to assess what level of access to STEM people have, clearly shows us the areas regionally where people have less access and the communities that have less access. It is, again, not surprising that it is actually young women in a socially disadvantaged background that are least likely to be able to engage with STEM. We have a number of initiatives that have specifically targeted getting to those communities. As I said in my opening statement, we have projects that are targeted towards the Traveller community, those in direct provision and those with autism. We have funded access to the creation of Irish Sign Language for STEM so that people with hearing difficulties can access STEM. That access piece is at the heart of what we do.

We are not positioned in the primary and secondary system. Our focus is mostly at third and fourth level, but through our engagement with STEM access, we are trying to pilot initiatives so that, as Deputy Conway-Walsh said, we can and should mainstream. We have, for example, been working with the Institute of Physics. It has done projects to identify the barriers to girls taking physics and chemistry. This comes back to the point we are making. I think we know what to do. We now need to get to the how and get it done because we have developed the evidence base. It involves doing the research. We all have opinions about these things and have our personal experiences about what we see working and not working in our own families or our own communities. It is really important that we build our policies on evidence and we look at pedagogical research which shows us what works. Perhaps it is unusual, but there has been such violent agreement with the statements made today around what needs to change and what works. We now need to implement that in a more systemic way, as the Deputy said, rather than in pockets.

There is a role for the piloting of new initiatives which constantly reach beyond and try to do better. That is what we would aspire to do particularly for those disadvantaged communities.