Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will try to be succinct and to the point. If there are any gaps, members should feel free to come back to us on them.

There will be something called an education passport at the end of sixth class and one will apply to go to a second-level school. When one is accepted, and only then, the school can ask to see one's grades and where one was. The education passport will inform the parents. The principal of the post-primary school will be able automatically to get it from the principal of the relevant primary school - data protection provisions will not apply. That will enable a teacher of geography to know, for example, that Ruairí Quinn has a literacy or numeracy problem, etc., and it will not take until Easter to work out, through the 30 children in the class, who are the strong ones and who are the weak ones. In fact, it is the group in the middle, the under-the-radar group, who get by because they do not stick out. The weak ones and the bright ones do. The purpose of this approach is to make the transfer seamless.

On computer literacy, the children need to teach us computer literacy rather than the other way round. Where would one start? I saw it at a family gathering in August where an 18-month old grand-niece picked up an electronic device and was swiping the front of it and shaking it to see if it would work. That is a big debate, much longer than time permits here. The children are coming in computer literate and the format is converging into an iPhone-Galaxy type format with everything else in it.

On a road show for the junior cycle we sent a document to all of the members some time ago. We all get so much to read, it is not possible to attend to it all. It is an interesting observation, given the reaction to it. There are short courses prepared by the NCCA that are available, and then we will be working with communities that want to develop a short course.

The number of construction places has dropped by approximately 50% within the institutes of technology sector since 2008. On the future evolution post the NCCA, I do not think there will be the stasis that there was for ten years when conservative forces within the education system merely put a block on reform. What will now have to happen, and will happen quickly, is a questioning of what happens to the transition year. We hope to get many of the attributes in those three years and transition year is something that we must consider in the next year or so.

There is nothing wrong with the leaving certificate curriculum according to professional educators. The difficulty is the impact of the points system, which is the function of the CAO. There are 14 points in the spectrum and one is never further away than 2.5% from one grade or another, and it is too rigid. We can change that, reducing it to approximately seven. Also, there has been the predictability in the questions that come up. If one wants to look at that in some detail, there is a website with a paper by Professor Áine Hyland, at transition.ie, in which she describes the way in which the admissions policy has distorted student behaviour resulting in a backlash on the leaving certificate, and, in turn, the junior certificate.

On the two questions Deputy Tóibín raised, we want to get the clustering of local enterprise offices close to the campuses, particularly those of the institutes of technology. A mission of the institutes of technology was to be as close to industry as is possible, to help that to develop, and to upskill the entire enterprise culture in the area and also provide education and training for their graduates. There has been some drift among some of them in recent years and they are now refocusing. The Hunt report recommends the maintenance of that strong dedicated technological sector which is what the institutes of technology are about.

All-island utilisation of third-level infrastructure makes common sense - Dundalk to Newry, Letterkenny to Derry, the New University of Ulster and Sligo - because of the configuration of the Border. It makes sense geographically to have east-west and North-South collaboration and we are exploring that.

On the question of foreign languages raised by a number of members, there are nine applicants for every teacher training place in primary school education colleges, most of whom come from within the top 15% of leaving certificate students. It is a cohort that most other systems in the European Union would die for. Most of those applicants will have a language qualification. Of the total of 54,000 who sit the leaving certificate, approximately 30,000 would have a modern language - predominantly French, then German and then Spanish. It would be my intention down the road that we would get those primary school teachers who would have taken a modern language in larger schools because this is another issue, to be able to teach a foreign language if that is what is wanted.

The foreign languages initiative was not considered successful. There was much noise around the system when I decided to take it out and to reallocate the funding within the Department for the improvements in primary school education. The NCCA did not recommend that this pilot scheme be made mainstream but it is something to which we must return.

The space displacement and the merits-demerits of Gaeilge and learning a second language is a big topic for discussion. The Secretary General made a major speech last week in Galway. He is a Gaelgeoir with a masters degree in Irish from Trinity College and is well equipped to discuss the matter. It is something on which there is no position in the programme for Government. We must look at the issue.

As an instrument for commerce, what PayPal has not stated to many publicly is that it was looking for native speakers in Dundalk, that Dundalk Institute of Technology went to PayPal asking was there any way it could help, and PayPal replied that there was not.

If one is speaking Latvian on a helpline with somebody in Riga, one does not need to be struggling with a Dublin accent. The person on the other end needs to understand the conversation clearly and properly.

There is a certain misunderstanding in regard to languages. Companies such as Google will recruit native speakers out of choice to provide that kind of service. I think we need a larger cohort of people studying languages but the focus has to be on ability to speak rather than a grammatical obsession with the modh coinníollach. The census revealed that 12% of the Irish population are foreigners, many of whom are first generation. Last Friday I took a group of people from the Chinese embassy on a tour of Leinster House. The five translators on whom we relied were their children, who were attending school in Ireland. It was wonderful to see them conversing comfortably with their parents and older members of the group.

I am not sure entrepreneurial skills can be taught in the same way as, for example, history. It is a question of teaching by demonstration. It is certainly one of the attributes we will set out in the 24 skills we are seeking to encourage but entrepreneurship takes many forms and manifestations. Can one, for example, teach swimming from a book without getting wet? Can one learn to ride a bicycle from a book? I do not think one can. If one equates books and teaching, certain attributes like cycling, swimming or entrepreneurship are more on the experiential side. The task is to replicate the experience, which is why forming companies and banks during transition year is the way to proceed. It is a different kind of learned experience to the traditional subjects like trigonometry and algebra.

On FIT, we have increased expenditure with FÁS from just under €500,000 in 2006 to almost €950,000 in 2012. The programme has proven very successful, although we want to do more between my Department and the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation to address the immediate needs of industry. Senator Cullinane spoke about the focus on the unemployed. The target group for these programmes are the long-term unemployed, with 60% of participants coming from this cohort and 70% being aged between 25 and 49 years.

Manufacturing never left Germany but we are speaking about a very sophisticated form of manufacturing. This morning I attended a breakfast briefing with a company which came to Cork as an IT manufacturing company. Over time it transferred much of its fabrication out of the Cork area because the branch has expanded into the area of software. However, the fabricating skill was retained in the company or had returned to it because of the sophisticated nature of its operations.

I agree entirely with Deputy Conaghan in regard to being creative. He made similar arguments on a number of occasions and I know he is passionate about the subject. Creativity is one of the set of skills we have identified in the curriculum breakdown of the NCCA. The final comment I will make about the link between enterprise and education is that the children who started school this September will in 12 years' time be studying subjects that have not been identified and acquiring skills that do not yet exist for jobs that have not yet been thought of and problems that have not yet arisen. I was asked many years ago to explain the difference between a technologist and a technician. The difference is that a technician knows exactly how well to perform a particular task but the technologist knows why the task is to be performed. We have to equip young people with the skills they need to analyse and solve problems. That does not mean we should not offer short-term conversion courses but that should be the focus of the formal education system.