Dr. Stephen Farry:

There is a wide range of issues to touch upon. I will begin with the issue of the nature of the formal collaboration on a North-South basis in terms of the institutional way we are addressing this area. To be frank, this is something that has been working well under its capacity since the Good Friday Agreement, and we should acknowledge that. In part it relates to the particular nature of the North-South Ministerial Council, NSMC, structures. As members will be aware, there are a number of formalised areas where there is bilateral co-operation and a requirement for meetings. Those were fairly hastily determined in the heat of the final negotiations around the Good Friday Agreement and were not the subject of a formal analysis. While there is co-operation at a formal institutionalised level within the NSMC around other forms of education, there is none in regard to further or higher education. I am open to that changing in the context of a review of those structures but that is a much bigger political issue. Others in my part of the world may have reservations about formally extending the nature of the institutional co-operation around those issues. In the absence of that, it depends upon the drive in terms of those leading the respective Departments. When I assumed office I was struck by the relative lack of engagement that had taken place. It is still not perfect but I and my officials are keen to increase the degree of dialogue we are having around these issues. I discussed the matter with the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, and from both our perspectives, we are not getting overly hung up about whether the institutional arrangements are formally changed, but we have both given a commitment that we will work in a pragmatic way, be it at ministerial level or giving directions to our officials to work bilaterally around these issues. I firmly believe that we have a good working relationship and that we are addressing issues and opportunities as they arise.

There are a number of common issues, North and South, on which there is a potential for greater sharing and engagement around information and various programmes we have in place. Sometimes, we will formalise that. To give an example, we had an official from the Department of Education and Skills on the review of adult apprenticeships that we undertook in Northern Ireland in 2011. That was done as a precursor to a similar initiative to be brought forward in this jurisdiction. We are currently engaged in a major review of apprenticeship policy in Northern Ireland and I note, with great interest, that a similar initiative has been announced in the South. I would be keen that we would share notes and experiences around that.

That in turn points to what we should be doing to address youth unemployment. The levels of youth unemployment around Europe are in part a feature of different levels of demand but they are also a product of skills shortages and skills mismatches. Simply relying upon a general education system, whether it be further education, higher education or the school system, to churn out young people who are job-ready is unrealistic. We may largely hit the mark but at times there will be an inefficiency in that there is a strong role to be played in terms of work-based training through apprenticeships. We are very keen to significantly expand the range of occupations to which apprenticeships are applied and also the levels at which apprenticeships are applied. Apprenticeships should be seen as part of higher level skills, not something that people do if they fail to get into university. They should seen as an genuine alternative pathway to the more formalised route through higher education. We have much to learn from some of our European partners - particularly Germany, Austria and Switzerland, although the latter is not formally part of the Union - in this regard. That is an exciting opportunity in both parts of the island which should go some way towards addressing some of the particular skills pressures that we have found.

That in turn relates to the issue of NEETs. These are people who are technically unemployed but would be perhaps further away from the labour market because they face some particular barriers or they have not had the same opportunities as others. There has been a very significant increase in the provision of resources for NEETs during the past 18 months and hopefully that is filtering through on ground. That was probably what Mr. Maskey picked up on in his constituency. We would be keen to sit down with him and map exactly out what he is saying and point him in the direction of what are new projects and what are pre-existing projects that may not be performing as well as they should be. There will shortly be a new round of funds under the European Social Fund which will refresh a lot of that offering. This area is a major priority for the Executive in Northern Ireland, as he will appreciate.

Returning to more of the formalised higher education co-operation issues, I echo the message that we should not have a narrow focus on who is doing better in terms of student flows and the implications that would arise from that, and Deputy Brendan Smith appealed that this be avoided. That is something we need to take note of but the medium to long-term solution lies in a rising tide in terms of student flows on the island. This feeds into the opportunities for specialisation. As the world gets more complicated, education and training needs to become complicated to keep up. Similarly, if research becomes more specialised and concentrated, there is a need for institutions, in turn, to focus their priorities. If there is a much freer flow of people on the island, that allows opportunities for specialisation and we would all be winners from that outcome. If we consider, for example, computer science and if we end up with one institution specialising in certain languages and another institution specialising in others, one can begin to see how we can all benefit from that. Similarly around research, many of the competitive funds, particularly FP7, involve applications across jurisdictional boundaries. Partnership between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on this will be vital. Both of us will stand to benefit significantly from that outcome.

Today's session has been very worthwhile. It helps me to understand the nature of the issues and how all the members view them. I certainly have a clear message that there is a desire for us to see much greater collaboration and discussion between the Ministers and officials in both jurisdictions.

There will be mutually beneficial outcomes for us all if we get this right. The committee has my commitment to continue exploring these issues and intensify that process in the coming months.