Mr. Tony O'Donnell:

I will respond to Senator Quinn's questions on schools. Significant research is being done by an academic in the Sligo Institute of Technology, who teaches on an IT programme, on the reasons that students in IT courses drop out early. He has done a great deal of socioeconomic and demographic profiling behind that and also work on the academic standard that needs to be achieved. He has found some interesting data on the skills backgrounds of people who go into academia who do not necessarily have it within their families, they have a huge amount of talent for the programme and an interest in it but the academic model is not best suited to delivering the outcome that they want, which is a career in the profession. Programmes like this are a more appropriate vehicle for that.

Our points driven approach to attracting people into programmes is a very poor guide to the successful outcomes at the other end, particularly at the lower end of the points needed for courses. The data shows clearly that student who meet the minimum requirement and 25% about the minimum requirement are more likely to drop out early. That goes back to the fact that the third level model is not necessarily appropriate to all people who want to pursue a career in that sector.

We have found that at third level we have a number of institutions which are ranked at the very highest levels globally so we have a system that has the capacity to produce graduates if it is supplied with the right talent. We come at the very bottom of the EU 27 in terms of our ICT education at second level. Significant data exists on that. We are finding that young people have more access to technology in their homes than in school. The students who are naturally curious and want to be practical do not get any opportunity to do that within the classic education at second level. They develop the aptitude outside and when they go to third level, on day one it is presumed they have never seen a computer before because that is the way our third level model is set up. Individuals with very strong practical skills who want to be in a practical course are, on a third level course taken right the way back to ground zero and they become demotivated and fall out. It goes back to this concept, which has been proven very strongly in Germany over a very long period of time, that one needs to provide a variety of routes to productive careers within the science and engineering sectors. IT is a newer domain within that but there is no reason that the type of model that has been so successful in Germany for generations and is continuing to be successful in IT could not be as successful in Ireland. From a recruitment point of view anything that we can do to grow the availability of skilled potential persons to hire can only be good for the economy.

From the point of view of recruitment in the IT sector, I have hired 20 people so far this year and I have another 20 vacancies between now and Christmas and it is a struggle to find qualified Irish candidates. My major concern is that if one of the major foreign direct investment companies got significant headcount for recruitment in Ireland and in order to source talent they upped the salaries at graduate level, one would get a forms of arms race, in which the IT companies would try to outbid each other in order to get the limited available talent or we price ourselves out of the market when it comes to competing with other locations globally and there is no further growth within our enterprise in the country. That is what we must avoid. Measures such as this must be commended in terms of their ability to deliver more qualified people at a variety of points across the skills spectrum. There will always be a requirement to have people with an advanced technical knowledge and with strong academic backgrounds as well. As with any other industry there is a requirement for skills at many levels and a variety of skills will be required in order to make projects a success. Anything we can do to endorse that or anything that committees such as this or public policy can do to assist with that can only be a good thing.