Maeve O'Connell (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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100. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if his Department will create a centralised third level information hub for students. [37814/25]

Maeve O'Connell (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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I thank both Minister and Minister of State for being with us here tonight. Does the Minister have plans to create a centralised third level information hub for students?

James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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Central to the Deputy's question is the provision of information in whatever form. The question mentioned an information hub. It goes back to a deeper question about how we guide young people - some not so young - but primarily school-leavers into the right choices in their career paths. We need to recognise that the day of a job for life is gone. We see the advent of digital and AI with skills changing all the time. We realise that the job market and the skills needs of today are not those of yesterday and indeed not those of tomorrow. Last Thursday I launched the national skills report with Dr. Kevin Marshall. On behalf of the Government, he is putting in place a skills report which looks at the future skills needs of the labour force. Following an OECD report he is working with his team to put in place a national skills observatory to look at the skills needed in different areas so that we can manage the pipeline and ensure those needs are being met.

There are a number of different routes through the system and there are challenges navigating that when people are trying to make those decisions at the early stages. There are centralised websites such as qualifax.ie which has outlines course and qualifications details. CAO.ie is probably one of the better known ones. We also have susi.ie for student grants and apprenticeship.ie for people taking the apprenticeship route. There is a lot of good information but it is scattered across different websites and can be confusing and time-consuming to navigate. It is especially challenging for those in lower socioeconomic spectrums who may not have that social capital behind them in terms of a parent or sibling who may have navigated the system before them and may find it even more challenging than others.

The programme for Government contains a commitment to create a new website with comprehensive information on third level pathways, supporting students across the island. That is an objective I am working towards and I have discussed with the northern stakeholders as part of my tour as a new Minister. We already pulling together the CAO and apprenticeship courses so that there is single information point. On an all-island basis, we are working on synchronising the UCAS and the CAO sites. I discussed that with the Minister, Dr. Archibald, at the North-South Ministerial Council recently. A lot of work is being done in that area. I will come back with more in my supplementary reply.

Maeve O'Connell (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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As the Minister is aware in the programme for Government outlines plans to create a single application portal for further and third level education. I would have thought that a first step in that is to create an information hub. The Minister correctly identified four different websites that people have to try to go through. It is quite challenging for young people to navigate all of this, particularly if they do not really know what they want to do. Asking them to navigate through these, even with the support of a career guidance person, can be quite challenging. It would be quite useful to have information on grants, application forms and other supports that are out there. The Minister mentioned earlier that people are not fully availing of the grants. This again indicates an information gap and there is certainly a complexity issue around that. I recently talked to a parent who highlighted that they looked at some of these application forms and they basically stepped back and said they needed a bit more time to think about it. There is a real opportunity for us to simplify things and enable more people to continue their education journey.

James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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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.

Maeve O'Connell (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael)
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I welcome that the Minister is trying to understand the behaviours. One of the potential problems of the CAO system is that it is easy. Students fill in their top choices and then they are done. They may not be considering the other options because they are much more difficult to navigate. I will give a specific example. Only about 12% or 14% of students study accounting at leaving cert but there may be many more who have an interest in it. They can do an accounting technician apprenticeship, they can go to college and study, or they can do the 12-week pathways course. However, if they have an interest in accounting this will not be presented to them in one place. Therefore, it is quite likely they may pick the wrong one which actually does not suit them. Somebody with the potential to become a full accountant may start their journey the wrong way and thus a more suitable path ends up closed off for them.

James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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I studied accounting for my leaving cert and then studied mathematics as an undergraduate. Perhaps my focus on numbers has been unfortunate in recent days. Perhaps there is a bigger picture than the pure mathematical realities, something I am learning.

Again I agree with the Deputy. The Minister of State, Deputy Harkin, and I recently launched a subset of the overall system but a really strong exemplar of what can work well - the modern methods of construction pathway. Recently in Mount Lucas, along with the Minister, Deputy Burke, and the Minister, Deputy Browne, the Minister of State, Deputy Harkin, and I launched a modern methods of construction skills portal and pathway.

Obviously, as a country, we have a significant housing challenge and modern methods of construction are one way we can get a productivity dividend. We can build more houses with fewer materials, fewer costs and less labour if we correctly deploy the technologies and modern methods involved. We need to get adoption and that skills roll-out into industry. We have put a portal in place that allows students, developers, craftworkers and people from all across the industry to find their way through and come out the far side. It is worth looking at the MMC portal. If we can do that at scale across the rest of the sector, we will have done some useful work.