Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is a huge credit to successive governments and officials and the work of the generation that went before us but - it is a big but - it is a very narrow view of the "word" education. All of what I said is true of one basically believes education is something one does in primary school and secondary school and then goes straight to college to do one's degree, maybe a masters and leave. When we include in education, as the Senator rightly did, lifelong learning, we are in a much more challenging position. That is the challenge of our generation. For those working in education policy now, their challenge is to recognise the word "education" and our understanding of it is different. It is not a set period of time in one's life. It is a lifelong journey. There are people in well-paid secure jobs and who are well-qualified who need to continue to dip in and out of and access to education. If we succeed, and we cannot afford not to, the profile of the student in Ireland will change very significantly. I say this all of the time but I believe it. More and more, students will be 40-odd years of age with a couple of kids, caring for a parent or whatever, but they will still need to access education. A four year full-time degree will not always work for them because they are holding down a job and paying a mortgage. The challenge for us is that the OECD skills report presents it starkly. We need to take the level of success we have had with the traditional view of the "word" education and bring that same vigour to lifelong learning. The statistics are clear.

Lifelong learning is measured by the participation of the adult population between the ages of 25 and 64 who were education and training in the last four weeks. If we start to measure at age 25 and go to 64, EUROSTAT measures that in Ireland the figure was 13.6% in 2021, which is not the worst and it is about average. Who wants to be average, right? The top EU performers are Sweden and Finland. Sweden had a rate of 34.7% and Finland had a rate of 30.5%. What does that mean? Effectively, it means Ireland's participation rate in lifelong learning is only 40% of the rate of participation in learning by adults in the top performing countries.