Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I take the point made that this is not a rebranding of FÁS. SOLAS will co-ordinate the provision of courses in all of the 16 education and training boards and the 18 training centres which, in the next 18 months, will transfer legally to them. Many of the courses will be provided by the private sector.

Senator Moran made the point we have a cultural conflict in that FÁS was open for business in its training centres 12 months of the year while the VEC educational sector grew out of the educational culture which existed previously, not with regard to the original training of apprentices which is what it had been doing, but in getting onto the academic calendar which is nine months of the year. This must change and it will be difficult to do. One way in which we could start to change it is to take people in the further education sector coming out of the VECs and instead of having 22 hours a week as their allocation for employment, to annualise this and give people a certain number of hours a year. This would not interfere with the actual amount of money they get but would certainly change the way in which they deliver these hours. It will be difficult, and there are no easy solutions, but we need to do it and we can do so if there is goodwill on all sides. From our point of view there will be.

The interaction between SOLAS, further education provision and the education and training boards will change the landscape of the provision of higher education and further education in this country. This is something we need to do and we will do so with the support of the players in the system, in particular the learners. I am glad so many of the Senators put an emphasis on the primacy and centrality of the learner. There is the old comment that sometimes one gets the impression hospitals are run for the benefit of the staff who work in them and not those who get sick, and sometimes one is tempted to say courses were adapted to meet the ability of the teacher to teach them rather than the needs of the pupil to learn them. This is part of a bigger and wider agenda we must address.

Senator Clune spoke about the expert group on future skills needs. This will be an ongoing part of what SOLAS must do. Senator Quinn spoke about Springboard and we must recognise there are many different roads to the same destination, and that one road does not have priority or primacy over the others.

On the question many Senators raised on adult literacy, and I mentioned it in my comments at the outset, we have so big a scandal in this country that we were not even prepared to measure it in any real way. I remember when Fianna Fáil was in government in the previous Administration a Minister of State at the Department, in response to repeated supplementary questions by me asking him to put a number on the scale of illiteracy, finally conceded reluctantly that it was 500,000. This is data from approximately 2009. We will publish information later and I hope the figure will have reduced. I do not hold out great expectations quite frankly because the scale of the problem is enormous and for many years, in this country in particular and we are probably not unique, if a problem was not measured it could be ignored because one did not have data. One must start with measuring the extent of a problem and then find strategies to address it and not expect overnight successes in getting it done.

The central role of the second chance, and I will not repeat my comments, is that literacy and numeracy will be an integral part of assessing ability to move up the qualifications ladder. In this regard I welcome the work done by NALA and Aontas, and representative learners will not only be on the board of SOLAS, but representative learners will be nominated by learning organisations and elected to every one of the boards of the education and training boards. There will also be representatives of educational stakeholders and the business world and employers on the education and training boards.

In each of the 16 education and training board areas, IBEC, chambers of commerce and ISME will be asked to nominate a man and a woman from the area to join a panel from which the council will appoint one person to the board. It will no longer be the traditional approach of deeming someone who lost a county council seat and now runs a shop to have a knowledge of business. It will be more structured and realistic.

I have taken note of the various submissions that have been made. I am unsure as to when Committee Stage is due, but I would be open to considering any amendment that could improve the Bill. Having discussed the matter with the Minister of State, Deputy Cannon, I was open to amendments on Committee Stage in the Lower House, where there was a great deal of discussion and many improvements were made to the legislation. No Department has a monopoly on wisdom as regards legislation, although there is a great deal of experience and expertise. The job of the Oireachtas is to fine-tune and examine legislation from a different angle.

I thank Senators for their wholehearted support of and welcome for this legislation.