Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his response. The Educational Research Centre's analysis of the result makes the point that students in Ireland have lower levels of familiarity with using ICT in schools and at home for school-related tasks than on average across all 34 OECD countries. This suggests a lack of familiarity with school-based computer tasks which has contributed to lower performance on the computer-based assessment by PISA.

The ERC also suggests that Ireland's relatively weaker performance in problem solving appears to be compounded by a more general weakness on computer-based assessments. I know the Department is due to bring forward a digital strategy for schools, but when will this be finalised? What is the timeframe for its implementation and what will the strategy's budget be? Has the Minister of State assessed, more deeply than his initial answer would indicate, the reasons behind our relatively average performance in this particular result?

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