Mr. Neil McDonnell:

On the team working issue, many schools are good at that, certainly in transition year but also up to junior certificate level. They put kids doing syndicate work and project work together. Where there is no emphasis on this, that should be addressed. I always say to new employees that it is not necessarily their technical skills that will result in them getting into trouble or an end to their employment, it is their soft skills, that is, the ability to deal with other people and communicate with people. Soft skills are essential in the workplace and if young people do not have an exposure to working in teams, they may struggle in that regard. Team sports are a great educator in that way but many kids are not involved in team sports. Similarly, students being given a project where a big task is divided into three, four, five or six smaller tasks and each person is responsible for one part of that task and that has to be co-ordinated is an introduction to the way the working environment works. Initiatives like that on a structured basis in the education system are really necessary. This is an area where young people run into trouble when they come into a formal work setting and are told to go away to work, possibly with a person who is 20 or 30 years older than them, and that is a big deal and they have never done anything like it before. That is an essential skill.

On the issue of Ireland not being world-leading, I do not wish to give the idea that I think the education system is going backwards. What I am suggesting is that peer countries are moving forward far more quickly than we are and they are constantly improving. Education is an iterative process and things change all the time. The advances we have seen in digital learning in the past two years purely because of Covid have been extraordinary. That will be a worldwide phenomenon. Are we going to be able to exploit it? If we are very conservative or move at the speed of the slowest participant in educational reform, that is where we will be left behind.

Other countries will advance quickly on that. It is not an absence of performance in our system. Rather, we are seeing high performance among peer and competitor countries.