Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, for whom I have two questions. The first question relates to Quality and Qualifications Ireland, QQI - I call it "The Bridge on the River Kwai" because it is a way I can remember it. We know what happened to that bridge; it was well built but blew itself up in the end. The question also relates to the education and training boards, the city guilds and SOLAS. How does the Minister of State intend to challenge and counteract the caste system that has built up between academic education, mar dhea, and vocational education? What is the plan to do that? The Department can have all the systems it wishes within vocational education but how will the Minister of State challenge that? Will he do it in schools, with parents or in shops? How will he do it? It is remarkably important because there is a terrible divide and there is only one way to pass the leaving certificate. At meetings of the Joint Committee on Education and Social Protection I have heard people referring to only seeing one route to education, development, training or employment.

It is so narrow. What is the Minster of State's big plan? What are the plans of QQI, the ETB, SOLAS and the City and Guilds to counteract that caste system? It is a very definite caste system, especially since we have to ask vocational education to help us build a sense of skill and form for employment and training in our country. That is something the Germans have done brilliantly, and that brings me to apprenticeships.

I have written about this and I sent most Senators a piece of work on it, which they might not have had the time to read, but it was centred on apprenticeships. In Germany there are 384 apprenticeships, England has developed around 170 and we have about 25 and they seem to be all in construction. They are not in forestry, inland waterways or the artistic constructional life-giving force workaday world. We are not creative in our plans; it is a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but we should have national and county projects that evolve all these great apprenticeships, be they from construction, water, forestry, greenery, life enhancing, or whatever. I read the report on the apprenticeships, but I did not see many apprenticeships coming out of it. It was employer led, consultative and they would be well functioning apprenticeships. What are they? Where are they? When are they? When will they happen? It is not enough to say they have to be employer led. We have massive resources in this country including water, land, agriculture and trees. I cannot begin to describe the amount of facilities we have here. One of the best reports came form Forestry Ireland, which stated that so much of our forestry needed young people to work in it. I am not talking about cleaning up, but about world class work in the preservation, maintenance and panelling of our forestry and what we can do with it.

What is the big idea? Why can we not come up with a massive creative idea county by county for these apprenticeships, training, education and employment? When young people go out, with a leaving certificate, or BAs, or MAs or no MAs or no BAs, they want to be engaged and they want work that is psychologically, humanly and physically worth while and that they are engaged with and passionate about, and not a filler in. We need to look a few major creative projects. We seem to be tinkering around the edges of all these new QQIs, but what are the really creative things that we can do county by county, city by city, area by area? I have gone down to these organisations all over Ireland and they need something a little bit more focused.

How is the Minister of State going to counteract the appalling caste system between vocational education and academic education? I am delighted to see some young people coming into the Visitors Gallery, and I welcome them. It is their future education that we are talking about, and the fact that many of them might move into politics and change things. We were only talking about that yesterday. The young people in the Visitors Gallery are the visual aids for the future, and everything we say in here about education and vocational education affects them. It does not always have to be academic. I was an academic all my life, but I never believed in the word. I believed in great teaching and great learning, because that is what it is all about. In the end, a person walks away with some kind of skill, not matter what institution the person is in, and it is skill he or she can bring to this country or abroad. We make these appalling distinctions and we are absolutely dreadful about it. I would like to know the Minister of State's plan and I would like him to tell me about the apprenticeships, because I am here and ready for the next two years until the election to help him out with it.