Urgent Government action is needed to address student's declining interest in science and technology, argues Danny O'Hare as today's Leaving Cert results confirm the trend away from these areas
Once again the Leaving Certificate results are a wake-up call for any government concerned with long-term planning for the future needs of the nation. But once again, to go by past performance, the Government's reaction will be merely to reach for the snooze button and disregard the signals - even as their volume becomes deafening.
The immediate concern of this year's students, and of their parents, will focus on whether their results give them access to the third-level courses they want. But for those of us not so closely involved, the focus should be much wider: what do these results tell us about our readiness to meet the fast-emerging challenges of a world that is changing before our eyes?
Our education system in the new era needs to be flexible rather than rigid, dynamic rather than static. At the very least, there needs to be systematic matching between what the system provides and the needs of our society, including the needs of the economy. To deliver that matching on a continuous basis, there is need for a policy process that we sadly lack.
At this stage, the problem is well known: having chosen a path of economic development that depends on high performance in a knowledge-based society, we are simply not producing enough people with the skills needed to do that. In recent years students (and their parents) have shown a declining interest in third-level courses that lead to careers in science and technology. At second level, this is reflected in lower take-up of relevant school subjects, as well as in lower performance in them. This trend has now reached crisis proportions.
So it is disappointing that we do not have a broad-based forum to consider such issues, much as the OECD recommended last year in its Higher Education Review: "There should be a National Council for Tertiary Education, Research and Innovation to be chaired by the Taoiseach, which would bring together the relevant government departments with an interest or involvement in tertiary education to determine a rolling national strategic agenda for tertiary education and its relation to innovation, skilled labour force and the economy."
After all, the future of science and technology in the economy should not be the sole preserve of the Department of Education. Departments such as Health and Children, Agriculture, Communications Marine and Natural Resources, Enterprise, Trade and Employment are among the more obvious ones. And a joint liaison structure with employers and trade unions would broaden perspectives and debate.
Nor do we collect and analyse good data on a systematic basis and use them to inform policy. The Skills Initiative Unit, headed until recently by Dr Sean McDonagh, produced excellent data and analysis, but it was largely unused. The trends which were evident did not make an input to the evolution of new initiatives or insights. The body which I am suggesting could perform that function also.
The report of the Task Force on Physical Sciences (which I chaired) called for an annual review of science and technology education by the Irish Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (ICSTI). It also called for the appointment of a government chief scientist.
Now that this appointment has been made, he and the successor body to the ICSTI should be charged with that responsibility. An implementation group was also recommended, and this function could be subsumed within the functions of that new body.
Sadly, the issues covered by the taskforce are largely as they were when its report was written. A lonely exception is the Discover Science and Engineering initiative from Forfás and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Other initiatives since the report was published - and which have been claimed as responses to it - were in fact known to be on the way and were taken account of in our recommendations.
The cost of implementing the report's recipe for reversing the decline in students taking courses related to science and technology was € 178 million once-off and an annual €66 million. These are modest sums in the context of what is at stake. And not all of the recommendations involved money.
More than three years later it is extraordinary that the provision of technical assistants to help science teachers set up practicals has not yet been agreed. It is even more extraordinary that schools' access to the internet - and the radical effect it could have on teaching and learning in schools - is expected to be driven by teachers alone without technical assistance of any kind.
This approach is at worst doomed to failure, and at best can achieve limited success where, by chance, teachers happen to have the competence to solve the inevitable technical issues that will arise.
The drift from science and technology is even more acute with high-points students. This has huge implications for the quality of students and especially for the health of graduate research. This will become even more serious if the number of students going to medical schools is increased in accordance with the reasonable demands of the Fottrell Study Group.
And because some of this increase in admissions to medical schools will be at graduate level, it is likely that the numbers of science graduates opting to undertake a research career will be adversely affected.
This emphasises the need for a broadly based policy group who would also look at the knock-on effects on science and technology student numbers of apparently unrelated initiatives. For example, the rapid expansion of places in information and communications technology contributed to declining numbers studying the physical sciences in higher education.
Getting our future mix of graduates right is a highly complex challenge that demands a careful and systematic policy response. Unfortunately we still seem to be a long way from such an approach. In the meantime, the world is not standing still.
Danny O'Hare is a former president of DCU