Mr. Dermot Stokes:

Thinking back about the experience of that measure, it acted as a trigger or it had a fundamental aim to help to direct funding from the European Social Fund. In Ireland it led to the establishment of community training centres, subsequently the Youthreach programme and PLCs, initially as VPT. It became the trigger or the driver of quite substantial system change. It is important to bear this in mind. I have now retired from active service, as it were, but I have been doing a study for the OECD on local youth employment strategies. I am bringing some of the encounters from that study to this discussion.

I will begin by stating that youth is changing. In 1994 when the social guarantee was in place, the transition between school and employment, between youth and independent adulthood, was a fairly straightforward. It was, relatively speaking, a short experience. Now, a generation later, youth begins earlier; physical puberty is achieved earlier and independent adult status is achieved later. Therefore, adolescence, per se, has been stretched out now between the ages of 12 and 25 - some would say even later - before emerging adulthood. It has become an extended and quite complex process. It is important to understand this process. We may think that helping young people to find a stable place in the labour market is a simple exercise but in the modern context that is not actually the case.

Work is also changing. Young people now have a greater capacity to communicate and much greater personal freedom but there is also much less structure and predictability and jobs are of shorter duration. This has a significant impact on how services conceive the idea of jobs and the transitions. Although there is increased mobility, the crisis has eroded the shield that qualifications provided. Now it is the case that unemployed young people include those with degrees. This was not the case ten or 20 years ago when a degree was a pretty good shield against unemployment. There are also significant levels of under-employment and part-time employment. The guarantee is not just a matter of switching on somebody who is stuck; it is a much more complex process.

In Ireland we are engaged in a major and extremely ambitious reform programme with regard to employment services, education and training structures and provision and reform of local government. These are very onerous reforms to be attempting while at the same time also trying to deal with a very complex issue such as youth employment and unemployment.

There is no youth employment strategy. One can infer a strategy from what is there but there is not such a strategy in place. We have to acknowledge that the Irish education and training system is socially reproductive. There are high levels of retention - meaning more people staying in education up to leaving certificate level - which is unusual in the European context. However, much of this statistic may be made up of parking, so to speak, where people have no alternative.

We have very late vocational choice in Ireland, which is unusual in the European context. That includes vocational choices in higher education. We have an extremely sophisticated and effective framework in vocational education training as per the national framework of qualifications. However, that is not necessarily mirrored in the cohesion of the vocational and education and training system. For example, we have a very small apprenticeship system and vocational education has a very low status relative to higher education and secondary education. In this regard we are quite different to many other European countries.

There are major issues to do with pathways for young people. In countries where the youth guarantee scheme has been effective they tend to have stronger vocational pathways and greater clarity in the structures. The German system is quite determinative but our system is virtually open choice and laissez-faire. Where there are not strong vocational pathways one needs to place a greater emphasis on guidance. In Ireland one could set out on one page a set of guidance measures. There is virtually no cohesion across the board and a very wide range of guidance issues.

Reference was made in the earlier presentation to the issue of disadvantage. I endorse everything Mr. Dooley said. However, when one talks to employers, there are other issues related to education and training which are very pertinent in the context of a youth guarantee system. I refer, for example, to the mismatch issue. Employers will say that they are not encountering people with the required qualifications. People are coming out of education with qualifications but these are not the qualifications which employers want. In other words, an employer advertises a job vacancy for which many applications are received but these applications do not match up to the job being advertised. We are not producing an appropriate balance of intermediate skills. Employers in the call centre sector, in the hotels and catering sector, the hospitality sector or in retail, will say that they are not encountering people with the skills they require. The jobs are available but they cannot be filled. Very often, employers have to import talent, so to speak.

We may also be producing large numbers of people with qualifications in ICT but employers will say that the particular qualifications are not the ones required by employers. We have many web designers but we do not need that many web designers; we need people with other IT skills.

Migration is an issue. Non-Irish people are emigrating and at the same time people are coming into the country. We have an immigration and emigration scenario. The research has found that some of those who are emigrating have jobs and they are moving to other jurisdictions. I refer to a study by Mary Gilmartin in Maynooth. Her view is that it is too early to draw absolute conclusions. We may actually be seeing an extended form of the gap year migration. It may be that instead of staying in Ireland in a low status job, young people are travelling the world and they may still return.

I will focus on a couple of issues to do with the youth guarantee scheme. Is it a quick fix for the current crisis or a trigger for systematic change? In my view it should be the trigger for system change.

It is important to take a long-term view as well as seeking to understand the immediacy of a crisis.

A question was asked as to whether the live register is the gateway to the youth guarantee. As members are aware, many young people are not on the live register. Information released a couple of days ago shows that the number of young people on the live register has decreased. If that is the case, then we have an issue and we must ensure all young people are accounted for on the live register. That would create another potentially significant political problem because the numbers would appear to be going up, even though it would not necessarily be indicative of any substantive change in the employment scenario.

There is an issue relating to increased caseloads in respect of Intreo and the new converged employment service. Those involved in the relevant services are also expected to meet clients three times more frequently than was the case in the past. Once one gets into caseloads, one is at risk of developing a process whereby attempts are made to move people into and off the system quickly. There are issues in respect of personal plans and profiles. For example, IBEC has questioned whether the personal plan model is appropriate if it is not embedded in a deeper guidance model. This is a matter which we must address.

Reference was made to employment options and I was asked whether there are enough jobs and, if not, what action should be taken. I was also asked if the education and training options are suitable to local employment contexts and to the needs of the individuals who are coming through the system. Travelling throughout the country with the OECD's LEED team, we were certainly impressed by the social enterprise models - as an alternative to employment - we encountered. To return to what Mr. Doorley stated, this relates to the need to keep people out of long-term unemployment and to ensure the engine of employment continues to run.

There are issues with regard to quality. The quality of what one obtains from a short-term programme must be equivalent one would obtain across the board. Quality is a measure of evaluation and it is important it is consistent and is based on good data. It must be remembered that there are structural and cyclical issues at play here. Early school leaving, for example, is a structural problem. All European Union and OECD states experience early school leaving both in good times, when systems are operating at optimum level, and in bad times. There is a need for structural responses to structural problems and cyclical responses to cyclical problems. It becomes quite an awkward issue because one may well be asking private sector providers to become involved in short-term contracts to provide for extra groups. This then begs a range of questions with regard to supervision, evaluation, monitoring and so on. In the context of the Youthreach programme, there is a quality framework whereby inspectors from the Department of Education and Skills provide external evaluations. Those inspectors publish their evaluations on an ongoing basis in the same way as they would in respect of schools. That is a perfectly open, transparent and rigorous quality system. There is also a quality system in place in the youth sector whereby anybody who has been commissioned to do work with young people not from those sectors needs to be able to satisfy the same kind of rigorous quality standards.

Overall, there is another issue which arises in respect of system animation and connecting the various elements of the system. This involves cohesion and communication. When IBEC compiled a study of employers that are using the different supports and incentives available to them in order to take people on, it discovered that a significant number of employers were not aware of these. We met groups of small and medium employers who stated that incentives were suited to very large employers but not to small employers. Many stated that they had not heard about the incentives, etc. I have figures relating to that matter which I can make available to members. It is really important to communicate what the youth guarantee involves and what we are trying to achieve. The Government recently changed the incentives in exactly the way that would have been recommended by employers and experts. However, it is important that employers should be informed of this. What we are discussing here must not merely be a mechanism for moving people off the live register. Rather, it must change the system and be part of a wider dialogue or discourse about employment, employment generation and economic regeneration.