Mr. Ray English:

I would like to make a couple of points. We recognise as champions the 17 people who went to Kazan this year and indeed all of those who competed in the competition in previous years. WorldSkills has also recognised them by giving them special pins to mark their achievements as competitors and champions. We do not make enough use of that when they are back here. Why are we not sending them out to second level schools and other places? We should tell them that we are going to send them around the second level schools for a couple of weeks as part of a sort of roadshow. We need to look at how we are going to develop that idea further on.

Interestingly, we have just started a conversation with WorldSkills about the One School One Country programme, which the guys would have seen in Kazan. The programme involves the creation of links between schools in Kazan and teams elsewhere. When I discussed this in general terms with Dr. Mary-Liz Trant of SOLAS and Dr. Vivienne Patterson of the HEA recently, we looked at how we can translate One School One Country into a much bigger event with the involvement of Generation Apprentice and the team. We want this programme to grow dramatically within Ireland. We will propose that to the WorldSkills board when it meets here in October.

Although we did not have a competitor in the painting and decorating competition in Kazan, it is interesting to note that 80% of the competitors were young females. Most of them were from European countries. It is also interesting to look at some of the results from Ireland Skills Live, which was attended by 15,000 people. Slightly more young women than young men turned up at the event. The ratio was approximately 51:49 in favour of young women. This is interesting given that the event was aimed at skills, apprenticeships and undergraduate studies. We really targeted the Saturday for parents. We were not sure how it was going to work out. It was really interesting to see a huge return on one of the days from young people who were saying that this is what they want to do and asking how they can move from an undergraduate course into an apprenticeship.

WorldSkills Ireland runs 56 competitions.

Some of them are new apprenticeships, so there is a changing demographic in the skills that we are involved in. It is also interesting that Ireland promoted cloud computing as a competition and it is now a WorldSkills competition. We have promoted building information modelling, BIM, as a competition, and it will be a full competition in Shanghai. We are starting to use our awareness of our economic key factors and to promote those to WorldSkills as competitions. New apprenticeships are coming on board which, when we build capacity, will also become apprenticeships. The comment about technical graphics was very interesting. That is a real lead-in to BIM as the guys there can tell the committee. How it is not an apprenticeship at this stage is beyond me, because there is a huge economic demand for it as well.