Ms Claire McGee:

Between the two of us, we will try to answer that question. I thank the Senator.

The important thing is we have made major strides in the development of the apprenticeship programmes in Ireland. The introduction of the consortia-led apprenticeships in 2016 really was a game-changer for apprenticeships in this country. It brought in companies which had no experience of apprenticeship and sourcing immediate talent into their businesses. It was a powerful thing to do.

Now we have a few years, a first review and some hindsight on that. We must also remember apprenticeships start and fall with employers.

That is why we need to bring as many employers into the system as we possibly can. The demand is out there for learners. Apprenticeship is a great opportunity to gain a high-quality education, work with fantastic and innovative companies and be able to use one's skills in practical day-to-day experience.

We have craft and consortia-led models. There is a difference in the financing of those. The craft model is very much part of the businesses' DNA in terms of how they grow and evolve and how they bring people into their organisations. The consortia-led apprenticeships are in new areas. They are in insurance, financial services and manufacturing and are brand new. In a sense, it takes a significant amount of change within an organisation to bring in an apprenticeship cohort because HR and operations must be structured appropriately to be able to mentor and train those people on the job and then release them for the off-the-job training. In order to support that and grow that type of talent development within those companies, which are used to hiring from universities, for example, PhDs, may be more familiar with hiring directly from ETBs and have traditional systems in place and for which, therefore, this is new, they need support to be able to offset some of the costs associated with hiring an apprentice.

We have done analysis with some of the companies that are currently engaged in apprenticeships. Having an apprentice can cost over €40,000, which is a significant amount of money. What this potential €7,000 could do is help offset some of those costs. They are like on-boarding costs. It is how the company brings in a new person when it has had no experience of apprenticeship of apprenticeship function in the past. It is really about trying to scale the number of companies involved in apprenticeship. This payment would incentivise more employers, particularly SMEs which need that quality talent now, by helping to offset some of the costs associated with delivering a high-quality apprenticeship at a company level.

We can send the committee more detail on that because we are doing some strong analysis with it. We are developing a paper on a single apprenticeship model to bring to SOLAS and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science and to spearhead that development. The gap is widening between the two models and we need to try to bring them into one, which has been the plan from the beginning.