Ms Claire McGee:

I will answer Deputy Kelleher first. I thank him for his question. I will very briefly touch on pre-apprenticeship programmes because the time for them is now while we have a very tight labour market and are looking at how we can provide more and more people with the opportunity to participate in an education programme. Pre-apprenticeship programmes are generally targeted at young people between the ages of 16 and 24. The aim is for them to progress fully to an apprenticeship. Pre-apprenticeships are aimed at giving young people the necessary skills, confidence and connections. The latter is incredibly important because in the craft or more traditional apprenticeships people might not have had that social network or the capital to ask an uncle or a neighbour to participate and be trained by them as a master apprentice. Pre-apprenticeships aim to give them that opportunity and that network to do so. They provide a combination of vocational training, hands-on experience and an opportunity to sample some skills across a broad spectrum of training programmes. Generally, they are targeted at young people who may not have been very successful until that point in making a positive or sustained transition into more vocational training. This is a tailored programme to offer them that. I was very heartened to see some of the recommendations in the recently published SOLAS review of Pathway to Apprenticeships. This aims to increase pre-apprenticeship programmes around the country by about 500 by the third quarter of 2019. However, this ambition will not be realised without adequate resources to enable such transition and changeover.

I will introduce the committee to a pilot programme under way with DIT. It is one of the first such programmes in Ireland and has not really received significant State funding to date. It has been supported by the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, a philanthropic fund, and philanthropic funding through the ESB. In 2017 DIT launched a pilot programme aimed at supporting the transition of young people, particularly from areas of socio-economic disadvantage in Dublin's inner city centre, to secure apprenticeships. DIT has its roots in vocational education. Traditionally, it supplied about 25% of the traditional apprenticeships. This pilot programme was about addressing young people's lack of knowledge in these areas to secure apprenticeships as well as those low levels of social capital that I mentioned and generally targeting areas within inner city Dublin. It was rolled out over 18 months, during which period 48 students were recruited on three separate 12 week programmes. The 12 week programmes focused on offering various different skills and opportunities to learn about different types of apprenticeships and ultimately to build links with employers in order that they could see the output of these programmes. This is known as worked access to an apprenticeship. It worked in partnership with employers to provide a two week work placement at the end of the 12 week programme. Over 50% of the apprenticeships managed to fulfil that workplace programme. The two week placement took place at the end and gave these young people a really good insight into a workplace environment and experience of what the reality of an apprenticeship would be like. It gave them an opportunity to determine whether this would be a pathway for them. DIT reached into its network of apprenticeship employers and developed a multifaceted work experience approach whereby apprentices had an opportunity to work with Sisk, with one of the aviation technology companies or with the ESB. The programme was also supported by an advisory board and had input from key representative groups, including IBEC; the HEA; the Technological Higher Education Association, THEA; the Dublin Regional Skills Forum; the Construction Industry Federation, CIF; and the National Youth Council of Ireland. Everyone gave their different perspectives from their experiences of young people, education provision and employment. After the initial pilot programme, out of the 48 young people, 26 moved into full-time apprenticeships.

This pilot scheme has, therefore, demonstrated in an 18 month period the power of a pre-apprenticeship programme and the transformational effect it can have. DIT is now working on a second-stage pilot programme, again funded by JPMorgan, and this time has managed to secure some State funding via the HEA. It is hoped this will aim to develop the programme and work on a couple of tweaks to refine it built on how it evolved over phase one. It will run from October 2018 to March 2021. How can we support this to bed into our system? Given the fact this programme was seen as a level 6 special purpose award, it was not fully recognised by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection as a qualifying programme for trainee allowances. This could potentially be a red-line issue in the future because the participants were not able to maintain social welfare payments. As a result, they forwent them for the 12 week programme and risked losing their payments upon taking up a course. This will be a fundamental stumbling block to rolling this out and achieving the number of 500 by the third quarter.