Fine Gael Innovation Spokesperson Deirdre Clune TD has called on Education Minister Mary Coughlan TD to address Ireland’s underperforming standards in maths education.
In the last few weeks Ireland’s underperformance in the maths education has been highlighted by two reports, one international and one from the Department of Education.

The findings of the international PISA review and the Department of Education’s Chief Inspector’s Report clearly show that unless maths teachers are supported and there is a renewed focus on the quality of teaching, we will continue to under perform in this vital area.

Ireland’s drop in performance in maths is the second largest fall of any country in the most recent PISA study. Ireland’s ranking in mathematics is 26th out of 34 OECD countries and 32nd out of 65 participating countries. Our PISA performance in maths falls well short of the OECD average and far behind the best performing countries. The international leaders in this area are Shanghai in China, Korea, Finland, Singapore, Canada and New Zealand. These are the same knowledge based economies that Ireland aspires to compete with for investment on the international stage.

Minister Coughlan did not need to wait for the PISA Report to establish that we face a serious problem in how we teach maths in our schools. On the 23rd November the Department of Education’s Chief Inspector, Dr Harold Hislop, launched the Inspectorate’s Report on English and Mathematics which found that:

In 15% of mathematics lessons the pupils’ learning was not developed satisfactorily;
Significant numbers of pupils are not experiencing an appropriate learning environment for mathematics;
That pupils in less than half of the lessons were enabled to work collaboratively;
That ICT was used in just 30.4% of the mathematics lessons.

The recently published draft national plan to improve literacy and numeracy in schools
goes some way in recognising that we have problems that need to be addressed. Fine Gael believes that only by providing math teachers at every level of our education system with the support, training and resources they need, can we reverse our underperformance in this area. Failure to do this will result in Ireland continuing to fall further and further behind our international competitors and impact on the future development of our country and economy.