Mr. Ciar?n Duffy:

If I could add to that, I do think there is an issue about confidence among primary-school teachers but also about students' perceptions. When they get into second level, they already have this preconceived notion that STEM is difficult. We have to really look at where that is coming from. If I tell a taxi driver that I am a maths teacher, the response is "Oh God, I hate maths, I was useless at maths". It is like a national pastime. We are delighted celebrating how bad we were at maths. Nobody would ever say "I cannot read, I find it difficult to read". That is a huge shift in psychology that we need to make in this country. Maybe it is something we need to look at from primary school. We need to move away particularly from treating maths as a subject of being right and wrong, black and white. We need to promote the idea of students challenging themselves, trying and doing something instead of giving up just because they do not feel they can get all the way through to the final answer.