Michael Conaghan (Dublin South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am a big fan of FIT because over the years I have seen the work it is capable of doing. I have experience of the partnership in Ballyfermot where it worked with Kieran Reid and which was a quantifiable success.

I am also in favour of its approach to apprenticeships and the need to define a new rationale for apprenticeships now but keeping their intrinsic values, and build the new challenges into a tried and trusted system. I was not very happy with the criticism of further education in the report which I think was unjustified. I will suggest why I think so and maybe the witnesses would revisit that criticism.

Further education is, relatively speaking, in its infancy. When it started 12 or 15 years ago there was no blueprint for it. It was trial and error in the best traditions of the vocational sector which has 150 years of European experience behind it. It goes into the marketplace and sees the need to create a continuum between education, training and employability. It has a very good record in getting that architecture right. It has had very significant success in two areas, in the new creative economy it has created levels for computer skills, child care, servicing the sport and leisure industries, creative industries such as theatre and the range of skills tied into that, building stages, designing costumes, etc. I was on the board of the college in Ballyfermot for many years and it has rewritten the script for a whole category of animation and has won huge awards, including Oscars, in that genre. That pulls in maybe 40 sets of skills to create a film, especially an award-winning film. It is under-rated. I have a lot of time for the witnesses and would like them to take a more nuanced approach to that section of the report.

The biggest success of further education colleges is that they have created a great dynamic in working class communities, particularly in Dublin. For example, in Crumlin, Ballyfermot, Inchicore and Coolock, areas where there was high unemployment, the colleges have put further education within the reach of people who would not otherwise have dreamt of going beyond secondary school or even primary school. It has created credibility on the street which is very hard to win. Young people are flocking to these colleges, transforming their lives and the communities from which they come and finding their way into jobs of whose titles perhaps they had never before heard. There is room to change that-----