Ms Inez Bailey:

I will start by responding to Deputy McConalogue's point about the €50 million cost. Maybe I will answer some of the other questions as I am doing so. Our call for funding to reach that level has been supported by Social Justice Ireland, which has done an in-depth analysis of the budgetary requirements in this area. We would concur with the results of that analysis. We have said how much money is needed to build up the infrastructure of the adult literacy service within the education and training boards. We are calling for additional supports to be provided to individuals to resource the intensive approach we are advocating. Such supports could include paid learning leave or intensive courses that are supported through the Department of Social Protection for labour market activation.

This would be in addition to what the adult literacy service is getting. The adult literacy service gets €30 million, the same as it got at the peak of the crash. It means that 0.01% of the education budget is being spent in this area, which is a tiny amount of money to service 55,000 adults, and that is why they only get between two and six hours per week. If these people are going to make progress in a short space of time they need access to a more intensive programme. Whether or not they can get it in the ETB system, they need other supports such as paid educational leave.

We do not have any statutory underpinning of paid educational leave and we are one of the last few remaining countries in Europe not to have some basis for paid educational leave. We are not empowering individuals within a workplace context to take up opportunities or motivating them with support from Government to take up lifelong learning. Irish workers have a huge disincentive in comparison with other countries. When paid educational leave was being heavily debated before the crash, the big issue was universalism and the fear that if we brought in such a provision for everybody the cost would be great, but we argue that it should be targeted at people who have qualifications lower than leaving certificate level. We would take a finite group of workers or unemployed members of the labour force and provide them with an intensive skills initiative to enable them to get to the next stage in the educational system.

We have not put a figure on how much paid educational leave would cost, but it would relate to a small number of people in the labour force. It is also a declining number, so there is an opportunity, in the next 20 years while these people will be in the labour force, to give them a boost, maybe on a one-off basis. The €50 million would be to augment the level that the ETBs provide, but paid educational leave or tax support would also be required. At the moment one can get tax relief on fees for higher education, and although people at the lower level do not have to pay fees, they still incur costs in taking up education and there is no support for them whether they are part-time or full-time, although there are no full-time opportunities. We have not gone into the cost of tax support for those who are working or into paid educational leave provision at some lower level, but we think it needs to be looked at, perhaps in connection with the minimum wage discussions. A lot of people who have low educational attainment or literacy issues are also caught up in the minimum wage. It might be worth looking at connecting the skills agenda with the minimum wage.

No supports are provided on a part-time pro ratabasis, as all the supports there used to be have been closed off to people. There is no elder care for somebody going to the literacy service. They do not get any bus fare and in rural areas there are huge transport issues. There are huge physical barriers to participation and, while these have been acknowledged, nothing has been put in place to address them.

Ireland is performing extraordinarily well in OECD terms in higher education attainment rates and we surpass the tertiary rates of most countries in the world. Equally, we are doing well in terms of our ranking in PISA. Our retention rate of 98% is also high, but the children who get the benefit of this better education system have already transferred into the labour market and done the tests in the PIAAC survey. They are given a different test in PIAAC from the one given in schools. It lasts for an hour, so it is not a test one would go into lightly. If a person had any doubts about his or her ability, he or she would probably not even take the test. People are tested for an hour on a different range of literacy and numeracy competencies they will have encountered in their everyday life, not on abstract problems, as might be the case in a school test. We are not holding the achievement we attained in PISA since 2000 in the scores we are getting for the adult population. The 15 year olds from 2000 are in the labour market, so they are not the same people, though they were in the sample.

Nobody in the social research centre understands how we can be doing very well on one set of tests for 15 year old children in a test environment in school while those in the workforce who volunteer to do the test score very badly. We are significantly behind the average on the PIAAC test in numeracy against all countries. We are at the bottom. We are also below average in literacy, though not quite as bad. John Sweeney, the economist who was formerly a member of the National Economic and Social Council, has looked at the statistics and his view is that secular trends will not solve the problem. We will not stop having people with literacy and numeracy difficulties just because our schooling system has managed to retain as many people as it has or is doing as well in PISA, because these figures are not transferring and we are not holding our position in lifelong learning terms. Every other country which is doing well in PISA or in retention rates has far greater lifelong learning participation rates. They are not just banking what they have in the school system; they continue with lifelong learning. That is not happening in Ireland. That is what the statistics show, and it demonstrates the challenge we are facing. When I started in my career 20 years ago we were hoping to eradicate adult literacy and numeracy issues, and that has not happened in any country in the world.