Mr. Des Murphy:

I will respond to Deputy Nolan's comments about the two-year pre-apprenticeship and the applied leaving certificate. We see the importance of the latter in a wide range of areas, so the two-year pre-apprenticeship is in no way a matter of replacing the applied leaving certificate. We are talking about the two-year pre-apprenticeship as a potential route for people who may not reach leaving certificate standard or who feel the senior cycle is not for them. At present, this is provided through the CTCs, the community training workshops, or Youthreach, but we are trying to bring that into a more structured format which allows progression to apprenticeship.

Deputy Nolan raised the issue of raising the minimum standard but over 80% of current apprenticeship entrants are at leaving certificate level in what would have been the standard crafts. When many companies advertise, they clearly seek people with leaving certificates. People need to be aware that in order to get through the curricula as they are being developed and as the new skills are coming in, they need good base levels. There was the issue during the recent downturn that people in the industry who perhaps came in without being at leaving certificate standard found it more difficult to cross-train or retrain. The leaving certificate also opens up the potential for progression into third level in the future. There is that progress route there and it is important apprenticeships not be seen as a dropout or whatever else from education. That is where we are coming from.

I also wish to clarify the question of resources. What we are talking about in this regard is very much that we need to attract skilled technicians and skilled craftspeople if they are going to be able to deliver at that level. We are talking about people who would have the potential to reach supervisory level within the industries involved, so there is the issue there of examining the whole salary and recruitment structure and the inability to recruit to permanent positions. In addition, if we are talking about having state-of-the-art training programmes, we need state-of-the-art facilities and equipment on which to train people. These are what we would identify as the resources required.

The league table Deputy Martin mentioned is a major issue.

When we talk about career guidance and everything else, the problem is that a principal of a school is judged on where the school is on the league table. It is very important for parents sending their children to the school. If a principal has 100 leaving certificate students and 20 of them achieve very good apprenticeships, it is a disaster for the principal because the school is seen as only having 80% of students going on to third level education. That is a critical thing to change. The student is going on and doing a level 6 or 7 course, but if that is not clearly identified and seen as being progression it is difficult to get the entry or buy-in into schools. It is detrimental to the progress of the school. There is an issue in that regard at present.