Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am conscious of the point the Senator has made about the split of Departments. I do not want to stray too much into the Department of Education and Skills. I take the point he makes that despite all the difficulties we have had this year with calculated grades - I accept there have been many - but in one way I wonder of some this year's students have obtained a place in third level that they might not have obtained had they gone through the traditional leaving cert exam because their teachers who know their passion and their past experience have been able to grade them. That has gone through all the safeguards and checks of the standardisation process. In that way it is fair to say there is no perfect system, including the leaving cert exam.

I have not done enough thinking on this to give the Senator a fair answer. I think there is a need for a broad conversation about how we move young adults from our secondary education system to the career pathway they want to be on.

I do not want to take the Senator's time but, on the apprenticeship model, even now we still sometimes talk about the traditional apprenticeships - by the way they are very important and there is a skills shortage - in some apprenticeships it is possible to do a masters for the apprenticeship. We actually have a doctoral level apprenticeship now. When I was a Minister of State, I met a chief executive officer of a bank in Germany who came to the bank as an apprentice and ended up being the CEO of a big bank. It is about a diversity of pathways. There is something in what he said.