Dr. Padraig Walsh:

On behalf of myself and my colleagues from Quality and Qualifications Ireland I thank the committee for the opportunity to talk here today about the role and potential of community and vocational education. As members will recall, QQI representatives attended this committee last week to discuss the application of what was recently referred to as the fees to community and voluntary providers. As members will be aware from that presentation, QQI is an amalgamated entity which in November 2012 replaced the Further Education and Training Awards Council, FETAC, the Higher Education and Training Awards Council, HETAC, the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland, NQAI, and the Irish Universities Quality Board, IUQB.

In the context of the brief comments I will make, it is important to note that in addition to being an awarding body and a quality assurance body, QQI is responsible for maintaining the national framework of qualifications, NFQ, and has statutory responsibility for ensuring that providers of education and training make learners aware of how they may access education and training, transfer from one part of the education system to another, and how the qualifications they obtain allow them to progressively move through the different levels of the NFQ if they so desire.

In respect of its relationship with community and vocational education providers, QQI is an awarding body and an external quality assurance body operating under the Qualifications and Quality Assurance Act 2012. Working within this legislation and the emphasis it places on the capacity of providers to deliver programmes, QQI envisages an evolving quality assurance relationship with providers of community education and vocational education and training. QQI will therefore be placing much more emphasis on the internal and external quality assurance of providers including how they design, deliver and assess programmes that lead to our awards and, in turn, to their inclusion in the NFQ. In the context of the recent establishment of the education and training boards, the introduction of SOLAS and the development of a further education and training strategy, we believe this will be a very important parallel development. It is also fundamentally in the interests of learners.

Following on from our meeting with the joint committee last week, QQI is looking forward to meeting with Aontas and with the ICTU community sector committee to discuss the impact these developments may have on the approximately 150 providers QQI currently engages with from the community and voluntary sector. While we have engaged with Aontas in the past, it is now imperative that we work closely with the community representative organisations to explore how the sector can constructively and positively respond to evolving quality assurance standards.

A potential reconfiguration of the sector with a reduction in the number of providers with a direct relationship to QQI and an increase in provider networks or consortia linked to lead providers presents challenges for the sector and for QQI. However, it also provides the opportunity for a strengthened sector able to more proportionately allocate its collective resources between providers, provision of education for learners and the maintenance of the quality assurance systems required to underpin this provision. We believe this is an exciting development.

Vocational education and training, with its inherent emphasis on access to employment, is going through an equally interesting transition. In Ireland, vocational education and training is largely associated with the poorly understood label of further education and training. In reality, vocational education and training is happening at all levels on the NFQ, and members have heard about that already. Specifically in this area we are engaging with Education and Training Boards Ireland, ETBI, and with individual education and training boards, to provide practical support in the management of quality assurance agreements, which need to be updated in the light of the aforementioned amalgamations and in the context of what were FÁS training centres now becoming incorporated into education and training boards, ETBs. Our hope and intention is to then work with the ETBs as a whole as they will need to engage as a sector with new quality assurance standards developed by QQI. As in the case of our work with the community and voluntary sector and with higher and education and training providers, our intention is to encourage the sector to collaborate and to share practice in all areas of their work thus focusing on quality assurance but also, importantly, on quality improvement.

While I have particularly referenced public bodies and publicly funded parties, it is important to stress that private providers operate in the area of vocational education and training, and both public and private providers work with awarding bodies other than QQI. The 2012 Act values these relationships while stipulating that they must lead to the inclusion of awards in the NFQ. A significant number of the awards of certain United Kingdom awarding bodies were aligned with the NFQ under previous policy developed by the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland.

The policy of Quality and Qualifications Ireland, QQI, in this area is developing and we are engaging with City & Guilds and other awarding bodies on its plans in this regard.

Finally, I wish to emphasise the importance of collaboration between Departments and State agencies as we collectively try to support the present and future operations of the community education and vocational education and training sectors. We enjoy good working relationships with An tSeirbhís Oideachais Leanúnaigh agus Scileanna, SOLAS, with our parent Department and with provider representative bodies. Our intention is to create opportunities to streamline this engagement as a national agency with responsibility for education and training at all ten levels of the national framework. In this spirit, we are currently establishing a 35-member consultative forum derived from representative bodies, including many of those present today, across the national education and training qualifications system. We expect to have the first meeting of this forum in early April. The interesting recent developments in the published review of apprenticeship are another example of how the relevant actors, which include SOLAS, the Higher Education Authority, HEA, further and higher education and training providers, employers, trade unions and QQI, can work in concert for the benefit of learners.