Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent)
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I thank our guests. It is a wide-ranging area. I had the misfortune to study physics in secondary school thinking I was going to do mechanical engineering but I ended up in a course that was all about maths, which I hated.

I will raise the matter of the learning background for physics and the curriculum, particularly at secondary school.

My own kids are going through that stage at the moment and I get the impression the situation is still the same in that physics is seen as a maths-like subject and people who are not into maths would not even dream of touching physics. That is reflected in its take-up. That is just one area. Have our guests engaged with the Department of Education on the point they were making about trying to change the perception of physics?

The role of specialist teachers and ongoing teacher training are key. I am going back a good few years but when I was in school, we never had a dedicated physics teacher. People who were teaching maths were trying to read the curriculum for physics and teach it. Many of them probably did not have the interest in the subject and that played out in the results. I do not get the impression the situation has changed very much. Where are our guests with the Department in trying to convert it to a new way of thinking about physics as a subject?