Dr. Martin Gormley:

Offering a subject on the curriculum also depends on the school's size. It is very difficult to offer a subject such as physics in a smaller school and, therefore, students are not studying it.

The starting point for any apprenticeship is that one has to get an employer to take the person on and that is a real difficulty sometimes. There needs to be an alleviation for the employer to take on the young apprentice, because it is a problem. Funding is also needed for upskilling or upgrading the facilities within the education and training board, ETB, which does certain phases, and the technological university, which does other phases. However, the starting point is with the employer and something has to be looked at in this regard. The curriculum in many of the apprenticeships has to be updated. There are so many electric cars on the road now that the motor mechanic apprenticeship has to be updated. It is the same for electricity and plumbing with regard to air to water, heat recovery and all of those different systems. A real job has to be done to upgrade the various curricula.