Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I do not disagree with anything the Deputy says. We have set an ambition to increase the uptake at leaving certificate level. I believe that the new way of teaching science at junior cycle will encourage more people into it. Our promotion of extra-curricular science, through supporting the expansion of SciFest, the BT Young Scientist exhibition awards and CoderDojo has had a proven impact, particularly on girls choosing science subjects.

There is clearly a need to have a very focused look at supply in areas such as physics and chemistry where we need people who graduate in these subjects to move into the teaching profession. I will be taking a hard look at how we can incentivise that move to make sure that our ambitions are not held up by needs of that nature. There is a tightness of supply in other subjects as well, as we have discussed at committee. A range of methods have been used in the past that have been successful. We will review the subjects in total to make sure that we have a suite of measures that will have an impact on this.

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