Kathleen Funchion (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to make a suggestion on the matter. I welcome some of the suggestions, especially of increasing the number of female students taking STEM for the leaving certificate by 40%. However, we need to start at post-primary level, because nobody is going to teach chemistry, physics or the other subjects if they have not studied those subjects at secondary school level. We need to incentivise those subjects so that people are studying at secondary school level and will progress into college and postgraduate level. That is an area where we need to go back to the drawing board and incentivise those subjects at that stage, because there is clearly a general issue of accessing teachers, particularly teachers who are qualified for the subject they end up teaching. It will become a crisis in the STEM subjects and while the plan is ambitious I fear that it will remain only a plan because it will be impossible to achieve if we do not increase the amount of teachers available to teach STEM subjects.

Another area we should look at is pay for new entrants to teaching. I am sure that many new entrants are discouraged at the moment, given the level of pay available. I encourage the Minister to look at it at post-primary level and see if we can start to encourage people to take on the subjects at that stage. If one has not had a grounding in particular subjects, by the time a person gets to college it is too late.

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