Ciarán Cannon (Galway East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The director general and current board of FÁS have done extraordinary work in the past two to three years in greatly enhancing the quality assurance process for course provision within the courses provided by FÁS and those contracted out to the private sector. I can be reasonably assured that that process is working because I had a meeting about this time last year with some representatives of the private training sector arguing that the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction and that the quality assurance requirements set out by FÁS were too stringent and very difficult to meet. I made the point that if they wanted to be involved in training in this sector, work under the aegis of FÁS and receive public moneys to carry out such training, they needed to adhere to such stringent quality assurance.

SOLAS, the new national further education and training authority, will have a role in ensuring this comprehensive monitoring of quality assurance continues. I will seek to establish a very comprehensive and easily accessed communication process between learners and SOLAS in order that learners can feed back the sort of information the Deputy is hearing in his constituency from participants on some courses. Before that happens, I stress that as far as I am aware, learners on all courses have an opportunity at the end of the course to complete a survey outlining their experiences of the course. Those surveys are used to determine future course quality.

If there are still issues and the Deputy's constituents are still concerned about particular provision, I would be more than happy to take their concerns on board and interact directly with FÁS to resolve problems, if they exist.

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