Ms Beatrice Dooley:

Deputy Catherine Martin asked about how we deliver information on apprenticeships to schools. We deliver such information through classes in schools. Most schools have a timetabled class in this regard for at least one of the years in the senior cycle. In some schools, students in junior classes may also take a module. It varies from school to school. In some schools, such as my own, there is a timetabled class in both transition year and sixth year. There are also sessions where counsellors meet students one to one. We are guidance counsellors and our work is holistic. We look at personal, educational, and vocational guidance.

The Deputy asked how we can get the message out. We organise events such as career days in schools. One of the very rich developments that has arisen from our wonderful engagement with SOLAS is that we are now interfacing with labour market stakeholders for the first time in ten years. My colleagues tell me there was great engagement with Con Power and the Confederation of Irish Industries in the 1980s. It was before my time but it seems to have gone by the wayside. We are starting from scratch again and it is working very well.What I am hoping will grow out of what I am doing with labour market-related continuing professional development, CPD, is that, when my term is over - I have a two-year term with one year left to run - the scaffolding will be set and that we will have support from policymakers so that this can become an annual event.

We evaluated the eight sessions we had last year and our members are calling for us to run them every year. They would like a full day; we currently have two hours. We have five sessions of CPD a year. I am trying to ensure that at least one session will be set aside for labour market information. Our members would like a full day. We would like parents to have input. We would love these labour market stakeholders to speak to parents for an hour or an hour and a half in the late afternoon when people are on their way back from work, with a focus on stigmatised routes so as to destigmatise apprenticeships, traineeship and the further education and training, FET, courses. I am afraid these courses are in the same bucket. People do not necessarily see their value. We spend a lot of time getting that message across. One third of students in my school take the FET route.

I work in a girls' school, so two students a year may take up apprenticeships. One of my great frustrations is that, when I have all of these very cool links with industry and the apprenticeship providers who come into my school, there may be five speakers from the Construction Industry Federation present and I have to strong-arm girls into the talk, which is embarrassing. In their aptitude testing, I identified 12 or so girls for whom apprenticeships would be perfect but when they went home to their parents and had a conversation about it, they were told they would not be taking up apprenticeships and were not allowed to go to the talk. I am not here to bad-mouth parents, but there is a lot of fear out there. I also saw this in my colleagues after the crash.

Some of the young people who were before the committee previously were in their early 20s, so they have not experienced what we are doing. We started this in December of last year, so the initiative is not even a year old yet. It is in its embryo stage. Those young people may not have experienced that for a number of reasons. We experienced cuts in 2012 and lost a quarter of our hours. Industry was not as involved with us at that time as it had been in the past. I do not know why, but it was not. It is now, which is good.

On the Deputy's suggestion regarding video, this is happening. There is a great deal of good, rich information on careers on the careersportal.iewebsite. There are videos of people talking about their jobs. That works quite well. What I would love to see more of, and what works well in my school, is past pupils being brought in for a careers day because teenagers like to hear from people of their own age group. They are more interested in their own age group. I am a fossil to them. Anybody over 30 is a fossil, a dinosaur, and irrelevant. Speakers need to be young as teenagers listen more to young people. They connect more and use the same language and vernacular. That works well. I would like that model in every school in Ireland. It is not in place because we do not have the resources.

At the moment, 27% of guidance counsellor activities are carried out by people who are not qualified or by people who are sourced externally. That is a lot of people. In addition, 64% of our members spend time dealing with mental health issues every day and two thirds of members are, for long periods, dealing with issues that should be referred but there is nowhere to refer them. We have many different balls in the air. We are very committed to apprenticeships. Our concern and our challenge is time. We are trying to get all the messages out. The other challenge relates to changing the culture. SOLAS gets this. It takes a good five years to change a culture. It will take a while to bring all of the guidance counsellors and parents on board. The older generation of guidance counsellors were a little bit afraid after the crash in the construction industry. They had experience of sending young people into apprenticeships only for their employers to lose their businesses. These young people then did not get to finish and this frightened the counsellors. We are providing the education. We are educating the guidance counsellors. What we need from policymakers is a structure to keep this going if we are moved out of our roles. It should not depend on personalities and whether there is someone who is interested. It should just be the way it is.

I hope I have addressed how we are engaging with labour market stakeholders. I sent an invitation to all labour market stakeholders and eight came back to me. I am going with the energy and working with the people who are interested in working with me. If others want to come on board, they are welcome. If anybody offering apprenticeships in green sectors is interested into coming into one of our 16 branches and addressing our members, they are more than welcome to do so. That is the way in because they then maintain contact with not only our members who work in schools, but those working in youth and adult services and prison services. Those guidance counsellors will then invite these people back to meet their students and to address them at career events.

There is a lot of work to be done in respect of parents. We can help with that work, but we need a bit more help. We meet every year group in schools and we present to the parents of most year groups in the course of the year. We are somewhat unique in that respect. We need a bit of support from somebody in industry, SOLAS, the ETBs, or somewhere else. The Deputy mentioned young apprentices. Every school in the country has them. Can we tap into the apprentices who attended our schools and ask them to come back and talk to the parents? There is a man in DIT, Mr. Mark Deegan, who has a very interesting PowerPoint presentation that shows how much apprentices earn. If parents were shown how much apprentices earn in their first year - I believe they start at €6 an hour and it goes up to €15 or €30-----