Mr. Seán Ashe:

I thank the Chair for inviting us to today's meeting and giving us the opportunity to make this opening statement. Kildare Wicklow ETB, KWETB, incorporated the former Wicklow VEC and Kildare VEC. Due to its size and geography, KWETB was established by ministerial order with a main office in Naas and a sub-office in Wicklow town, approximately 95 km apart. Following extensive discussions with administrative staff and others, we decided to locate the finance function in Wicklow town and the corporate services and human resource functions in Naas in an effort to bring cohesion and efficiency to our operations. KWETB manages a region that is part of the commuter belt outside the M50 and has experienced significant demographic change over the past five years and continues to expand exponentially. This generates significant workload and challenges for management.

The KWETB service plan budget is €138 million, with €30 million of that allocated to further education and training, an increase of 39% since the amalgamation. We have a projected capital budget between now and the end of 2018 of €50 million to €70 million. We have over 2,500 teachers and administrators as per the P35 total. We have in excess of 13,000 main scheme students, which is an increase of 15% since amalgamation. We have 16,251 beneficiaries of further education and training, an increase of 29% since amalgamation. We have issued 27,809 QQI awards since amalgamation. There are 21 post-primary schools, six community schools and one large stand-alone PLC college of over 1,100 pupils under our remit. We have recently been engaged in the development of two community national schools that are expanding rapidly and currently cater for 400 pupils. We have seven Youthreach centres, seven vocational training opportunities scheme, VTOS, centres, two youth officers, one apprenticeship centre and ten adult basic education centres. I am very proud to say that we piloted an innovative refugee education centre in Kildare town which became the model to be used elsewhere in the country. I thank the staff who set up that project for their dedication and commitment to supporting the Syrian population in Kildare town. We have one outdoor education centre. We have two trainee centres: Newbridge community and training workshop and the Racing Academy and Centre of Education, RACE, and farrier school in Kildare town. We are one of the largest providers of school completion programmes and have eight under our remit. We have two prison education centres, operating out of Shelton Abbey and the Midlands Prison in Portlaoise. We have a music generation project, which is expanding, a sports promotion unit, a music education centre in Bray and five adult guidance services.

We are operating across the entity out of 79 locations, which is a fairly challenging task, but nevertheless as my colleague who spoke previously said, our function is to get out there into the communities and deliver services at local level. In addition we have 23,000 co-operation hours, as they are known, where we provide local institutions with teaching support services.

I ask members to look at the chart - I will take the highlights out of it - of our comparative statistics between 2013 and 2016. Our operational budget, as I said, is up 39%. The staff pay budget is up 5%. The whole-time staff equivalent is up 21%. Post-primary students are up 15.5%. Post-primary-community national schools are up by 14.2%. Our FET students are up by 28.9% and our capital project spend is up 90%.

KWETB is delivering large capital projects, land purchase and project management in conjunction with the Department of Education and Skills and other patron bodies. This is in accordance with the expanded responsibilities under the Education and Training Boards Act 2013.

We are currently delivering on the following major capital projects. Naas community college is an €18 million project at stage 2B and I hope to have the stage 2B report in the Department next week. Maynooth community college and Maynooth post primary school are in one campus now in Maynooth. That project is a €30 million-plus project; it is the largest second level project ever undertaken in the State. I am proud to state that project is progressing at a rapid rate and hopefully we will have buildings by September 2018. We have Greystones community national school going into the RAPID programme. We have St. Conleth's in Newbridge currently under construction. We have a PPP project, Coláiste Ráithín in Bray; that is due to hand over, I understand, at the end of the month.

In addition the ETB has progressed eight major capital projects into the 2018 capital building programme. That was a major challenge in itself. What it means is that the bulk of the schools in our ETB either have new buildings or will experience new extensions. KWETB is also providing or managing new start-up schools and extensions to existing schools for other patron bodies including Educate Together, An Foras Pátrúnachta, the Church of Ireland and the Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin. There are a total of nine major capital projects. Those projects are located in Wicklow town, Bray, three in Naas, two in Kildare town, Templerainey in Arklow and Athy. That is a significant workload, but we undertook it. I think there is value for money in the way we approached it in that we are using existing stock of buildings to enable the Department start up these projects in these locations at no cost to the Exchequer.

The other thing to note about the entity when it was formed was that there was no training in KWETB. When the training function transferred from FÁS, we were challenged as to how we would deliver training facilities across the entity. I highlight three in my opening statement. Marine House is in Wicklow town. We have now developed a hospitality trainee centre of excellence. That will deliver the skill sets that are needed and currently in high demand from the hospitality industry. There is a major deficit there and I think this building and the staff we have put in there will meet the needs in our entity. I was over there yesterday and I was delighted to see that we have a group of Italian trainers teaching Irish people who are unemployed how to make pizzas. I asked one question, "What's the cost of the oven?" It was €30,000 supplied from Italy for this project, which is going to roll out a new line of pizza product across the State. I am delighted to say that with the initiative of our head of training and our head of FET we got that project into Wicklow town.

In conjunction with Intel and FIT, fast-track into technology, we also developed a new mechanical-electronics course in Celbridge. The significance of that project is that all the trainees from the first cohort were employed directly by Intel. It has come back to us to train another cohort. It has asked us to expand that programme into pneumatics and we are currently working on that. They are innovative new courses. SOLAS has asked us to develop a centre of excellence to train apprentice electricians and we are dealing with that.

For an organisation or entity that had no training centre, what we are trying to do, as is the board's policy, is to deliver locally and regionally. I think that policy is working. I would like to thank the board for supporting it.

We have noted the following challenges. There is a lack of authority to recruit staff for eight years and consequential lack of expertise. I would put in there that because of the rate of expansion we have experienced, the shortfall in providing teaching staff is also caught in that statement. We have a high level of increase in responsibilities with, as I have said, no increase in staff. I think I have outlined the activity there. I will not go into the detail, but it is quite significant.

KWETB is a strong organisation in a continuous high-growth situation with student numbers increasing at a rate of 5% per annum.

A key management risk that is identified is the lack of an effective financial information technology system. I know the Department of Education and Skills, through the PMO is working on that. I was privileged to chair the payroll shared services committee and still chair it.

I will outline our plans for the delivery of accounts and particularly to address the concern of this committee over the delivery of the accounts on time. We are working closely with the Comptroller and Auditor General and the ETBI finance forums and will continue to do so over the coming months to ensure on-time delivery of accounts. On reviewing the Comptroller and Auditor General report to this committee - this was the November 2016 report - I note that KWETB submitted our 2014 accounts. I think we were the second ETB to do so in that period. One thing that puzzled me was the length of time it took for the accounts to be processed. I am only assuming it was because we were also piloting new formats of the accounts for the Department and we were also piloting the merger of our software systems, our financial systems, our payroll systems and our creditor systems on behalf of nine other ETBs. We were the pilot scheme. I would like to thank the staff involved in that because it proved to be a very successful project and now we have an integrated system across those nine ETBs, using what is known as the ESI/Manser system.

I would hope and am confident that draft financial accounts can be produced within the timespan stipulated by statute going forward. Every effort is being made in-house to ensure that will be the case. I am confident that next year's set of accounts will be delivered in a timely manner.

KWETB is a dynamic and vibrant organisation prepared to engage and manage the challenges it faces. It is fortunate that its key operations staff will go the extra mile and continually upskill. It is committed to the delivery of excellent customer service and corporate governance. KWETB has operated within its sanctioned budgets and made the adjustments to its expenditure necessary to remain as far as possible within budget, but more importantly even though we had sanctions from the Department and from our own board for borrowings, we have not borrowed since 2012.

The focus is on channels of funding but we also receive funding from the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, the Department of Health, Pobal and EU sources. A significant range of bodies fund the entity, all with different accounting requirements with which we have to deal.

We are educationalists and our primary focus is on the delivery of a first-class education system for our learners. We must keep them in our sights at all times to ensure we deliver a world-class education service.