The research involves an analysis of documents relating to the development of Project
Maths up to its national ‘roll-out’ to all schools in 2010. The mass of empirical data for this
analysis will come from official government publications or government-commissioned
publications, OECD reports, national and international reports, departmental papers,
studies, strategic plans, review documents, mathematics syllabi etc. – that is, the set of
documents and acknowledged texts which relate in any way, either partly or in full, to
mathematics education policy, and to the reform of mathematics curricula at second-level
in Ireland. The documents analyzed emanate from a diverse range of sources – local,
national and global, the published acknowledged narrative. Michel Foucault uses the
felicitous phrase ‘a history of the present’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 31) to describe this kind of
undertaking. In his work it is an analysis of how things have come to be as they are.