Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I find myself in pretty much complete agreement with Deputy Nolan. I will go through the issues. With regard to the regions and remote learning hubs, Deputy Nolan is entirely correct. Relatively recently, some time last year, I attended a launch. There is a lot of talk about remote working hubs and I believe they are working reasonably well, and particularly well in some areas. There is an extension of this to come with remote learning hubs. The Technological University of the Shannon and its president, Vincent Cunnane, is involved in this. A number of universities, and particularly the technological universities, are showing an eagerness to do this.

I visited Longford Women's Link and women in Longford are studying remotely doing degree programmes with, if my memory is correct, the Carlow campus of South East Technological University. There are already examples of this and there should be more of it. So that no-one misrepresents me, this would not be as an alternative for those who wish to go to university full-time and get the full college experience but to recognise that not every student is 18, 19 or 20 years of age. The OECD report on skills tells us that more and more of the students of now and the future will be in work. They will be engaging in lifelong learning. They will be holding down a job and paying a mortgage when they need access to education. This is really where the remote learning hubs can come into their own. Yes, there is a willingness from us to do more of it. It is a very good idea.

I also think, and this is where I thought Deputy Nolan was going to go with her questions, when it comes to building student accommodation in the regions we should have an openness to building student accommodation that is not specific to this university or that university. We should have an openness to building student accommodation for the region. For example, whether people in Galway are going to ATU or the University of Galway should not matter; there should be student accommodation for people who are students in Galway. We are speaking to universities about this.

With regard to student accommodation officers, the short answer is that we should do this. To be very honest, when we spoke to the universities a number of years ago, not now and I am not speaking about the current leadership to be fair, people saw student accommodation not as the core part of the job of a university. They saw it as the universities doing education and the market or the Government doing housing. This does not really work because if people do not have a roof over their head and clarity on where they are living it is very hard for them to focus on their education. As the universities get more involved I do not think it is fair to leave it to the students' unions and local Deputies, particularly student unions which have to scramble to find solutions for people. Building up capacity in the institutions on accommodation is key. As part of our new policy approach we are looking at the idea of student officers. We are engaging with the technological universities specifically on this.

Deputy Nolan is right in what she said about apprenticeships. All of us here speak about building houses. It is very important that we need to build more. None of us will build houses. We need approximately 50,000 more people to work in construction by 2030. There are some encouraging signs. Deputy Nolan asked a direct question as to how we are doing on the trades and crafts registration. The answer is that we are doing pretty well. Last year 8,717 new apprentices registered. Of these, 6,588 were in the crafts or trades. We are a little ahead of target on where we want to be. I must also be honest and say the targets need to increase. As the targets for housing increase we are going to need to increase these figures also.

We are looking at some reforms. For example, the painting apprenticeship takes four years and there is now a belief that it could be provided in two and a half years without impacting quality. We will roll out a pilot on this later this year. Last August we published a careers in construction action plan which looks at how we promote more people taking up careers in construction. This year we will launch a €750,000 campaign to promote careers in construction.

On the German model, the short answer is that we look at many different countries for best practice. What appeals to me about the German model, and I think it appeals to many Irish people, is with regard to, if we are to be blunt, a snobbery about third level education. Let us be honest; many mums and dads in this country have decided that somebody else's sons and daughters will be apprentices and their sons and daughters will go to university. We need to align universities and apprenticeships. People can now go to the Technological University of the Shannon and do an apprenticeship there. They can have a graduation the same as everyone else and access the library the same as everyone else.

We need to move beyond this conversation I hear all the time of asking people whether they are going to third level or doing an apprenticeship. An apprenticeship is third level. It provides people with a qualification under the national qualifications framework. When it comes to an apprenticeship in Ireland people can do a PhD or a masters as an apprentice. They can do a level 8 qualification as an apprentice. With regard to the German model and what we can learn from it, it has this integrated system whereby when people go to third level education they might go one way or the other but they are still in the third level education system. This is something we are working on.