Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat Senator Dolan. There are a couple of things there. The Senator is right on resilience. I say in a complimentary fashion about the Department of Education rather than anything else but a lot of the skills we learn, we learn them before we arrive in third level, in terms of how we are prepared for third level education and to pick a discipline, to focus and the likes. I very much welcome the work the Department of Education and my colleague the Minister, Deputy Norma Foley, is doing in terms of senior cycle reform. It is a real effort to rethink how we prepare students and to move beyond just rote learning. What used to be rather disparagingly called soft skills, which are now called transversal skills and are now seen as being in big demand, are important. I note a number of universities, as they review their curriculums and programmes, are looking at how to embed those transversal skills in programmes. That is what employers look for as well. There is interesting stuff going on there.

We are very excited to launch our National Tertiary Office in the coming weeks. I am delighted that Dr. Fiona Maloney has been appointed to head that up. This will be a structure that we will now have in place to look at that piece the Senator talked about, namely, different pathways to getting a third level qualification. I am excited about that.

I am really pleased the Senator Dolan brought up lifelong learning because we can be truthful and at the same time disingenuous in how we present education statistics. I could sit here today and factually say Ireland is one of the best performers when it comes to higher education, which we are, we have more people attending higher education in younger age groups than probably any other country in the European Union and so on. All of that is entirely factually correct.