Mr. Phil Flaherty:

Absolutely. It is a difficult issue. There is a unit within the Department which is managing the transition process relating to SOLAS and the education and training boards. We have asked the boards - both those without training centres and those which have such centres and which serve the areas relating to the latter - to come up with proposals regarding how all of this is going to be managed and to how the work of the training centres can be fitted in to the relevant reporting structures. Those proposals were only received in the past week or so and the Department is considering them.

To some extent, the area of apprenticeship is not the most difficult, although it is a difficult issue more broadly because it continues to be legally the responsibility of SOLAS and is delivered through the training centres almost on an agency basis in some respects, unlike education and training more generally, which is the statutory responsibility of the individual education and training boards. That issue is in hand and hopefully solutions will be found and there is a process in place to manage that. I will leave it to my colleague on my right, Mr. Keith Moynes, to speak about the appropriateness on our ambitions in respect of the third level sector.