Professor Lisa Looney:

I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for the opportunity to have an input into today's discussion. I represent the IUA, the eight members of which play a key role in STEM education. We design and deliver the programmes that provide specialist STEM capabilities and capacity. We educate the educators at all levels from early years on, including specialist teachers of STEM. We engage in research about STEM education. We are leaders and partners in activities to strengthen and diversify participation in STEM.

We acknowledge the value of STEM literacy broadly and the fundamental role of early childhood, primary, and post-primary education in shaping motivation and interest in STEM subjects and developing the associated skills. Integrated STEM education from early years on is key. Success in this is predicated on teachers having content knowledge and confidence across STEM disciplines. Diversity in STEM goes hand in hand with access to a wide range of subjects and appropriately qualified teachers. Committee members will have heard from other stakeholders about the challenges associated with each element of this recipe for success. We in the IUA support the addressing of those challenges.

While STEM literacy on completion of post-primary school is empowering for citizens generally, there is a clear need to capitalise on it in specific ways. It is important we meet skills needs across key sectors of the economy, and open the door to and sustain rich careers in STEM for individuals. This is where the role of IUA institutions primarily sits. As such, the level of interest among school-leavers in STEM programmes, and their preparedness to be successful in those programmes are important to us.

In terms of initiatives to generate interest in STEM, a multitude of which are led or supported by IUA members, we urge that policy move to provide consistency and substance in funding, so that momentum can be maintained for individual activities, our ability to evaluate impact is improved and we can seed new innovations to drive interest in STEM. Preparedness for university study is linked to competence in core underpinning subjects, such as mathematics and the natural sciences and we welcome positive trends in the uptake of higher-level leaving certificate STEM subjects, including mathematics. However, we echo concerns expressed by others to this committee that the Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, data show the higher performing cohort in Ireland is behind its peers internationally in mathematics. The growing number of students taking computer science as a leaving certificate subject is a positive and IUA encourages Government to ensure computer science is offered broadly and that education is funded for sufficient numbers of secondary school teachers to upskill in computer science.

To capitalise on STEM education to address skills needs, including skills focused on the challenges of climate change and the digital transition, we need a policy focus on scaling the provision of STEM programmes at third level. We also need a broader strategy for lifelong learning, including reskilling and upskilling to unlock the potential for STEM participation and inclusion. IUA institutions have been proactive. We have absorbed a significant number of additional STEM enrolments over the last six years. Despite this and the support of the Human Capital Initiative, funded from the National Training Fund, shortages of STEM graduates exist very broadly. If anything, emphasis on areas such as ICT and engineering seems to have reduced and policy shifted to shortages in health-related disciplines where Government is the main employer. We cannot afford to reduce emphasis on the physics, sciences, ICT and engineering aspects of STEM. We are far from meeting the skills challenge currently and that has a very negative impact on competitiveness.

The single barrier to increased provision of places on STEM programmes is underfunding, both recurrent and capital. That funding, which is available under targeted schemes, is often allocated in a piecemeal way which does not add capacity. Funding the Future explicitly accepts that we must bring our staff-student ratios more in line with our European peers. There is no argument about where we are on funding in that sense. The agile development of new STEM programmes, teaching active pedagogies, providing more laboratories, running more research projects, providing academic supports and producing quality online resources all absorb significant time and insufficient numbers of staff limit our ambitions for all of these. In effect, because of funding, IUA members are currently stalled in our ability to do what we want to do, which is to strategically plan enhancements for STEM capacity and provide greater agility to respond to STEM skills need. This can only change by addressing the gap in core funding. The first step of €40 million towards that, while very welcome, was considerably less than that required to have meaningful impact. We call for the urgently needed investment of €307 million per annum to be fully addressed over the next two budgets with at least €150 million provided in budget 2024.

The second dimension to underfunding is capital investment. STEM-related programmes by their nature tend to have higher capital investment requirements. Investment has been very low since the financial crisis. IUA institutions have borrowed to fill that gap and most are at their borrowing limits at this point. There is very little else we can do in terms of capital investment without a focus on this. The remarks I have made about funding apply not just to taught programmes but also to research programmes in STEM at master's and doctoral level, with respect to capital investment in particular. The work that is taking place on the review of PhD supports and the new research funding agency are important opportunities to address those issues in terms of support for STEM and research.

In talking to this committee, the Union of Students in Ireland emphasised diversity and the importance of a culture of inclusion in STEM and those are priorities we in the IUA echo. As an engineer and former executive dean of a faculty of engineering and computing, this is an area of particular interest to me. There are three short points I want to make around this area.

We have had a sustained focus on women in STEM for more than 30 years. I know because I have been there for the past 30 years. This has delivered progress but at a frustratingly slow pace. We need to keep doing what we have been doing, but we need to add new thinking around things such as gendered perception of confidence, the difficulty of STEM, how we use role models and how career risk is perceived. We now have a much larger pool of young women with strong competence at higher mathematics than there was a decade ago, but that competence is not translating into a higher number of women choosing STEM at third level to the same degree. We should examine how that could be changed.

The stakes have risen compared with what they have been. We are heading into a very exciting time for science, engineering and technology, with the adoption of artificial intelligence tools. The people who will shape our society, businesses, healthcare and policymaking will be those who can navigate STEM concepts, are not intimidated by the terminology and can understand the value of STEM artefacts. Unless we effectively address lack of diversity in STEM, the technology divide will create faultlines in society and women and people from poorer families will be on the wrong side. A new level of urgency is merited on the issue of diversity and inclusion.

We have submitted some written information which I hope will be helpful.