Mr. Tom Rourke:

I would like to respond to Senator Quinn's comments. We do need to think about how we present and position this. I have heard people use the word "snobbery" in the perception of these courses. When I was in secondary education there was a definite difference in perception between where my parents wanted me to go to school and the local school which was referred to as "the tech". When I left school I got a job and studied in college at night for the next ten years which effectively meant that I had a far longer day in which to do what we are proposing as a model for IT.

There is definitely a perception issue. It is one of the reasons that we have proposed a pilot programme at a reasonably hefty scale because without a pilot of this scale people will not begin to take it seriously.

From my experience of having taught in third level colleges on a part-time basis, when one gets under the skin of the programmes increasingly everyone has begun to redesign IT programmes in particular around a mix between theory and lecturing and projects. The challenge with setting projects is that they are trying to engage students in the same work as the apprenticeship model does, but they will always fall short because they are an artificial construct, a project created without the direct exposure to professionals. One of the key concepts of the German model is that close working side by side with people who are actively engaged in the work and that mirrors the project construct in the academic model but in a much more realistic way, where all the extra skills around what happens in the workplace beyond the project that makes the project possible are conveyed. There is a perception problem and we need to be mindful of it as we roll this out.

I keep harking back to Germany, but the benefit of having quite a considerable number of senior colleagues in IBM who are Germans working in Ireland is the interesting conversations on the choices that are made for our kids in education. The key message that comes across is the issue of parity of esteem. A German may describe how one of their children has taken the professions route and the other has taken a much more academic route and they have later decided to cross over. That is not spoken about in the way in which we as Irish parents might speak about one of our children who decided to stop pursuing an academic career and took a job or who went into something else. There is an esteem issue which is based on a lack of understanding of what the model means. There will be a need for communicating that very clearly to parents and students so there is no confusion about where this is positioned.