Ms Sarah Swaine:

A key element to the success of the initiative is the availability of data and using that data to drive further interrogation. A lot of the Departments may have had other goals in mind initially but they needed further time to scope out the availability of data or put in place systems to record the necessary data. I do not think it precludes future rounds of this initiative having more ambitious goals in that respect. It is important for the first round of the initiative that everybody is able to participate at the different stages and contribute the data that is being collected and for the goals that are currently in place, we will be able to do that.

Two Deputies are waiting to come in and I ask them to bear with me for one moment, as I do not normally do this. I want to follow on directly from Deputy Calleary's question because it relates to something the committee has been looking at. There is a high level target of 300 for apprenticeships. There is very little information around that. There are tangible things that are easily measurable. Has the Department figures for things such as the number of overall apprenticeships, the total number of women taking up apprenticeships, what access is there for them to do so or what percentage of uptake would the Department wish to see? In his response, Mr. Beausang said that it was a start and we could do more later but I suggest it was a very limited approach. If any effort had been made at a high level, the Department could have looked at the percentage of women who were able to take up apprenticeships. That does not begin to deal with all the other areas of education which were not touched on at all. Something as simple as saying that there are, for instance, 10,000 apprenticeships and we would like 50% of those to be made available to women by a given date could be done. Was any consideration given by anyone to including something like that as a high level target?