Dr. John Sweeney:

Some employers will calculate in that way. It is one of the things that brought JobBridge into disrepute so quickly. A small number of employers realised this would be a short-term subsidy to their current business model and went for it. The significance in the wider picture may be quite small. The employer subgroup on the Labour Market Council is alert to that and is trying to advise the Department as to what to do, how to watch and so on.

Several members, particularly the Chairman, referred to the balance in evaluation between the quantitative and the qualitative. I suspect, like many, they may be reading some of these evaluations and getting sore heads from the numbers being crunched and the metrics being used. In the long run what is going on here? This was very acutely observed in a presentation made on Monday at a conference in Dublin Castle jointly organised by the Geary Institute of UCD and the Labour Market Council. The speaker, Mr. Nigel Meager from the UK, reflected on the work programme in the United Kingdom. He said that if one sets out to prescribe only in general outlines what employment providers should achieve but one does not specify much how it should be done, one will always be left wondering what the results mean. If we are told that this programme is not working because at the end of it, those who took part in it are 30% less likely to be in a job than those who did not take part in it, we are left asking why it happened. If the impact evaluation is not balanced or accompanied by a process evaluation and if the number crunching is not accompanied by a narrative outlining what the education and training providers, case officers and individuals participating were looking for and how they experienced it, we end up scratching our heads a bit.

Already the Labour Market Council has seen evidence of that with the very impressive number crunching done by the ERSI on the back to education allowance, but it was left wondering what it needed to do about the programme. To be left with the binary option of closing it or keeping it going despite the evidence is not that helpful and rather assumes that the education and training providers, teachers, instructors, lecturers and the people, for whom going back to education is a big investment of time and energy, are all fools. We now have a qualitative evaluation of the BTEA in process precisely for the reasons members referred to. We need to balance quantitative and qualitative evaluations. There are instances of that being done very well in, for instance, the ESRI's work on secondary education. I do not know if we have yet brought that balance into our evaluations of active labour market policies.

I fully agree with the Chairman's remarks about soft skills. I repeatedly read about the importance attached to them. I believe Tony Donohoe at the committee's previous meeting articulated that extraordinarily well with evidence from IBEC. By and large, employers will say that if they have the right soft skills, the employability skills, the employers will teach employees the content of much of what is required by the job. However, we have done very little work on how to bring about that greater self-confidence and those abilities to listen and be a good team player and problem solver. These cannot be done with two or three days' communication modules. The evidence is that these soft skills are best incorporated as hard modules into occupation-specific training programmes. It is difficult to impart or to raise competency in soft skills in isolation from an educational training programme that is targeting a specific occupation. The soft skills needed to enter, for example, Intel with third level education are quite different from the soft skills needed to enter the hotel industry. Soft skills have a significant occupation-specific element, but it is hard-wiring modules on soft skills into substantive vocational education training programmes that is needed.