Mr. William Beausang:

I am head of further education and training, apprenticeship and skills policy, as well as tertiary education policy, at the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. I am joined by my colleague, Ms Karolina Murphy, who is the AP in the skills unit. We are grateful to the committee for the invitation to attend today's meeting to discuss the European Year of Skills.

The announcement of the European Year of Skills 2023 was a very welcome development for us at EU level. The main themes underlined by the European Year of Skills are very complementary to our objectives and priorities for national skills policy as reflected in the role and mandate of the Department of Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science.

In broad terms, our overall approach to skills policy is to ensure that all different dimensions of the tertiary system, that is, further education and training, FET, higher education and our national research and innovation system, work together to respond to our skill and workforce development needs for a world of work that has been transformed by technology.

This is crucial to ensuring that each individual in our communities is provided with the opportunity to realise their potential. It is also crucial to the quality and sustainability of employment and to the productivity, innovative capacity and competitiveness of industry and enterprise. It is clearly crucial to securing economic, social and environmental sustainability and to strengthen the performance of Ireland's knowledge economy and economic model.

I would like to highlight how well in advance of the announcement of the European Year of Skills 2023 in November 2021 in the Department of Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science we commenced the work in partnership with the OECD, to review our national skills strategy to 2025, which strategy had been in place since 2016.

That piece of work has been instrumental in refining and in enhancing our skills priorities that were in the strategy. The OECD work did not just look at the issues facing skills policy through the lens of its own expertise and the extensive data and analysis it would have internationally. Its findings and recommendations can be very much characterised as a co-designed piece of work as it featured a very high level of engagement with all of the stakeholders, including, of course, enterprise and the social partners.

That is very much in line with the partnership approach to skills policy nationally which we know is key to both successfully addressing the shared challenges and leveraging the opportunities presented by the skills landscape. Of course, it is one of the central planks of the EU's year of skills, as the committee will know from the statement received from the European Commission.

The insights and perspectives of our national stakeholders, as I said, strongly shaped the main themes of the OECD review and its analysis strongly reinforced the assessment that Ireland's human capital, embodied in the skills and competitiveness of its workforce, has been at the heart of Ireland's economic and social transformation over the past number of decades.

However, notwithstanding the huge progress in educational attainment, we are certainly not at the end of this journey and our ambition must be to create a learning society in which all citizens have the opportunity to participate. That is critical to our capacity to respond to what the OECD characterised as the megatrends, which other people regard as the megathreats, which are the four Ds which were framed in last year's national economic dialogue, of: digitalisation and artificial intelligence, AI; decarbonisation; population ageing and demographics; and de-globalisation. The working world has been shaped by the impact of these developments and a striking finding of the OECD review is that despite the strong positives of increased educational attainment and progress in developing foundational skills in our young people, many adults do not have the skills to succeed in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. The overriding conclusion from the review is that the scale and pace of change globally is such that Ireland's skill's ecosystem is now required to take a leap forward.

At the same time, the OECD review identifies how we can respond to this challenge by securing a step change in lifetime learning, where we lag behind top EU performers. The review has a detailed and comprehensive set of 24 recommendations relating to each of the four themes of the OECD review of how this can be achieved.

We look forward to discussing these recommendations and the opportunity they present with the committee this morning. Today, I believe, is the closing day where the event closing the European Year of Skills is taking place in Brussels but our work and commitment in Ireland to the national skills agenda continues and will need to intensify to be successful because it is central to the delivery of the mandate of the Department and pivotal to the delivery of key Government strategies, namely, Housing for All, the Climate Action Plan 2023, the National Digital Strategy for Ireland, and the national development plan, NDP. I am again grateful for the opportunity to meet the committee to discuss these issues further and I look forward to responding to the questions the committee may have.