James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)

The Deputy is absolutely right. As I said in my initial remarks, there is a programme for Government commitment to bring together the different portals into a shared information hub. That is very much a work in progress. I have canvassed the different agencies on that as I have been meeting them in my short time to date. We have tried to come up with an integrated tertiary system, covering further education, higher education, apprenticeships and all the different routes that people can pursue for further education and training beyond their leaving cert. Some of this goes into pre-leaving cert. My colleague, the Minister for education, Deputy McEntee, is doing work on her side of the system on how we get supports out through career guidance counsellors. It is one of the ones where it meets in the middle. We are also doing some work on behavioural science. My Department is working with the ESRI to better understand the choices that students, apprentices and young learners make and why they make them. They may not be for intuitive reasons. They may not be for the reasons that we might project our own world views on. There may be other interesting findings from that. All of that together will inform us as to what behaviours students exhibit, why do that, why they make certain choices and how we can help them to navigate, including by means of a comprehensive and unified portal.

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