Áine Collins (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The core objective of this Government is getting people back to work. Only last week the Government launched the 2013 Action Plan for Jobs outlining the strategy to do this, with 333 initiatives. One of these initiatives gives employers a financial incentive to employ people who are long-term unemployed. The JobsPlus scheme will provide businesses with grant payments per employee of €7,500 for those who have been unemployed for between one and two years and €10,000 for those who have been out of work for over two years. The grant will be payable over two years. This will provide valuable training and work experience for people who have unfortunately found themselves unemployed. While this initiative is very welcome and adds to a range of initiatives that the Government has introduced over the last two years, such as the reduction in VAT for the hospitality sector, a more fundamental job must be done in matching skills to potential job opportunities.

Unfortunately, because of our concentration on the building boom and the skills attached to it, many of our unemployed do not have the skills to avail of new employment opportunities. This is now widely recognised. As a nation we spent billions of euro of taxpayer's money on FÁS training schemes. Money was squandered by that organisation on many useless projects at a time of near-full employment. There is now an urgent need for a restructuring of our training systems if we are to make any significant impact on our huge level of unemployment. The Education and Training Boards Bill and the Further Education and Training Bill form the central planks of the reorganisation of our training and education methods. The Education and Training Boards Bill proposes that the 33 VECs be aggregated into 16 education and training boards, known as ETBs. Each ETB will be required to provide education programmes and opportunities for adults and make available wider education and training supports to other education providers, other than those under the ETB itself. There should be a role for development companies to identify needs and opportunities at local level, especially in rural Ireland. Under the auspices of the ETBs, courses can be aimed at providing training opportunities for employment at a local level. This involves a twin process of aggregating a number of the VECs into a single ETB and assimilating FÁS training services into most of the ETBs. In practical terms, these reforms will include the introduction of shared services in areas such as human resources, payroll and pensions, as well as many more cost-saving exercises. I have often wondered why some public servants are paid weekly and others fortnightly while still others are paid monthly, but that is for another day.

In an overall context, ETBs will be governed not only by the Education and Training Boards Bill, which is currently on Report Stage, but more importantly by the Bill before us today. All of this new legislation will provide ETBs with clarity about the future and define their relationships with others involved in education and training. The ETBs will now be solely responsible for the provision of an integrated, publicly funded further education and training service in their geographic areas, which I welcome. They will also be required to collaborate with bodies such as SOLAS and the National Employment and Entitlements Service, NEES, in order to ensure the implementation of national policy. This is particularly important in terms of labour market activation and meeting future skills requirements. In essence it means that people who find themselves unemployed will now have a real opportunity to be retrained by virtue of all of these organisations working together. All this will be driven by local service agreements between SOLAS and the ETBs.

The purpose of the Further Education and Training Bill is to give effect to the Government decision to establish an education and training authority. It mainly provides for the establishment of SOLAS, under the auspices of the Department of Education and Skills, as well as the dissolution of FÁS. Much of the Bill is very technical and deals with issues such as the transfer of staff and property from FÁS training divisions to the newly-formed ETBs. SOLAS is the overarching body, which will facilitate more coherent and integrated national and regional planning across the further education and training sector. The Bill provides that the Minister can advance moneys to SOLAS and that the latter may provide grants subject to certain terms and conditions.

The rest of the Bill mainly deals with various structural and staffing issues. As the Minister emphasised, SOLAS will not be delivering courses on the ground; that will be the job of the ETBs. The role of SOLAS will have many parallels with that of the Higher Education Authority in the higher education sector. The aim of SOLAS is to work with the ETBs to harness what is good about our further education and training system and make it even better for those who use it. The new system must encourage people to train and, more importantly, to retrain for jobs that will become available. The central objective, as always, for this Government is to get people back to work. I believe this reform in our education processes will greatly add to this objective and I commend the Bill to the House.

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