Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael)

I second Senator Fitzgerald's timely motion on the need for the Minister for Education and Science to come to the House before the budget. Senator Ross also spelled it out. Yesterday I attended an OECD meeting about education being fundamental to enhancing growth in our economies. The clear message was that education should not be cut, that neither preschool, primary nor secondary should be touched and if third level education is to be touched, loans must be facilitated. We need to cop on in this country and in this House but particularly the Government needs to cop on. The problem is that we do not know what the priorities for growth should be. We do not educate for the sake of education; we educate for economic and social progress. The facts show that everywhere economies grow, they are linked with high learning outcomes. We need a second debate on how well we are doing with regard to learning outcomes because we are doing poorly at the top and poorly at the bottom and we are pretty good in the middle. This is the reason we are averaging out. However, we do not have the top graduates for the big posts and this is why Google has to employ people from abroad and we have 17% falling off the wagon as a result of early school leaving. Above all, the message from the OECD was that we need to set our objectives as a nation beyond budgets and beyond elections. We need to know what is good for our country and for our nation in order to save our people.