Professor Maurice Devlin:

It can be done. As with everything else, it is a question of balance. I completely understand that civil servants are under enormous pressure in many aspects of their work in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. Even within youth affairs, it is a highly complex environment. I can understand that it is entirely attractive to have numbers that communicate something about something that is going on. Those numbers can then be communicated elsewhere relatively readily. As the Senator said, that is the national policy and the context in which we live. It is not just the case for youth work. However, it seems, given the nature and history of youth work, and the previous richness of some of the policy discourse around youth work, including the Costello report, which people in the sector still refer to respectfully, that things have moved extraordinarily far in one direction in youth work. We are teaching social research to students all the time, including youth workers who we hope will become researcher-practitioners. We are telling them that a good research design will very often have both a quantitative and qualitative dimension. It is often their integration that will tell you most. It is an awful shame. If the opportunity to even discuss these matters at the committee is valued, we can build on it.

I will return to Senator Ruane's question about apprenticeships because I do not think anyone touched on it and I meant to do so. At a previous session, I heard the Senator speak from her own experience about the importance of recognising there is a variety of routes into youth work and opportunities for progression to wherever people might want to go. Different people will want to go in different directions and take different steps to arrive at different stages and levels and so on. That was precisely what was envisaged 20 years ago in that national youth work development plan. It was proposed that there would, on a North-South basis, be a co-ordinated approach to education and training for what is now called "the workforce" but that term was not used at that time. It was to be applied to all of those involved in the practice of youth work, including volunteers, part-time workers and full-time paid workers. It envisaged a coherent set of pathways that would align with the national framework of qualifications and would be designed and delivered as appropriate for the various constituencies within the workforce.

A great deal of what we have done in Maynooth over the years has been by means of our part-time in-service programme, which was first introduced at the end of the 1990s in partnership with NYCI as a response to what was then seen as an urgent need for people who are practising without qualifications to be given opportunities. That was supported by the Department of Education's youth affairs section. That support, modest but vital, continued up until the economic crash. Now, on a much more appropriately resourced scale, the apprenticeship approach might help meet some of the critical need. It can and should be done. That has been part of the discussion up to now. It should be done in a way that ensures people who enter youth work through the apprenticeship route are on a par with people who enter it any other way.

In that regard, I want to mention one other thing that was briefly touched on in both our paper and NYCI's. The North-South education and training standards committee for youth work was a policy initiative arising out of that national youth work development plan 20 years ago. One of the few elements of the plan that got up and running is in overseeing the professional endorsement of youth work programmes, very successfully. That is due for review. The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth knows that and it was very welcome when it said it would wish to review it. However, the review is being held up by the fact that it is a North-South committee and the political stasis in the North means that Northern approval for a review process cannot be secured. We would suggest that in the absence of that formal review of that committee going ahead, there is no reason why the Department could not or should not go ahead and review the aspects of its policy remit that relate to professional education and training and associated matters like workforce.