Dr. Peter Rigney:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to make a presentation. Like my colleague from IBEC, I made a presentation last July on the question of apprenticeships. In ICTU's view, one of the key components of the strategy would be the development of a broadened and modern apprenticeship model for our economy. This is the responsibility of the newly established apprenticeship advisory council which will be launched next week.

It is worth noting that we have just emerged from our first European semester since our exit from the troika and we have received a recommendation on the development of a modernised apprenticeship system. I suspect we will be given a recommendation along these lines in the country-specific recommendations for next year. At European level, the EU Council has called for open pathways and parity of esteem between vocational education and training and general higher education. This call is articulated in the Copenhagen declaration and is based on research conducted over a decade by CEDEFOP, the European Centre for Research and Vocational Training. Many of the issues we face in Ireland are in fact Europe-wide issues.

The priorities of the further education sector in Ireland must reflect the priorities of the ESF which is one of the major sources of funding. These priorities are, first, to combat long-term unemployment by ensuring that individuals can access employment via in-demand skills development, together with improving the qualification levels of lower skilled longer-term unemployed; second, to support those young people not in education, employment or training, NEETs, to participate in programmes which include work experience with labour market relevance; and, third, to increase social inclusion by targeting interventions with appropriate ongoing supports. These are reflected in the three drivers of training developed by SOLAS which are the labour market, social inclusion and lifelong learning.

I was a member of the committee that helped to draw up the SOLAS training strategy and I am fully committed to it as part of what I consider to be collective responsibility. Each of the three areas I mentioned will have differing metrics, reflecting the divergent needs of their client populations. One of the first tasks of SOLAS has been to put credible metrics in place, in co-operation with all the stakeholders.

As other speakers said, the further education sector now represents the ETBs and the FÁS training centres and in our view, it should absorb what is best in both bodies and cultures in terms of corporate culture and operational models. A key aspect of the system which is being developed must be the development of work-based learning including the development of tools for monitoring the work-based element of the learning. This will need to go beyond the informality which surrounds much of education-based work experience. Perhaps part of the price we pay for a modern quality apprenticeship system is a lessening of the requirement for work experience in other areas of the education system, lessening the requirement on employers in exchange for the rolling out of apprenticeships in other areas.

It has frequently been said that SOLAS will be to the ETBs what the HEA is to the universities and the institutes of technology. We agree that there is a need for a national body to steer a national policy. One of the strongest aspects that SOLAS brings to bear is its evaluative skills and its skills in labour market forecasting contained in its skills and labour market research unit. One of the key issues for the sector in the future will be labour market contact and labour market relevance.

An underpinning value of further education must be the credibility of the awards. Awards are like currency; they are pieces of paper which, of themselves, are intrinsically worthless but on which society conveys a worth by virtue of what they signify. Citizens must be certain that the standards set by QQI are consistent. We must also be satisfied that when problems arise, as they have done in the past, they are fully examined and lessons are learned.
As stated, a problem faced in the further education sector is one of parity of esteem. This has been identified at European level. Frankly and simply put, this means some FE courses are not regarded as highly as higher education courses, even though the FE courses concerned might have better completion rates and employment outcomes than the HE courses. The challenge for Ireland is to overcome this problem of perception and to name and challenge the organisational behaviour which fosters this perception.
If there is one thing I want to stress in my presentation, it is that the overwhelming issue for us is the development of a modernised apprenticeship system.