Feargal Quinn (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State back to this House, having been demoted to the Lower House. The Minister for Education and Skills was in here recently, and I got the feeling there was something less than enthusiasm for the leaving certificate applied. I am a great believer in the leaving certificate applied for further education. I am not sure where we are going with that. The Minister stated that the numbers have dropped, but if we are going to have employment in the future, it will not just come from construction and from the high-tech business. They will certainly be big employers, but retail, hospitality and catering are all important. In the leaving certificate applied, I saw youngsters at the back of the class who were left behind at the age of five or six, and then discovered in the leaving certificate applied they were the best in the class at something. It could have been debating, cooking or anything else. I could see them growing in confidence.

Could we have tax breaks for businesses to provide training? As somebody who spent his life in business, I am well aware of the benefits of further and continuous training, which means that if we invest in people, we can make them into very successful managers who are loyal and passionate about their job. One of the keys of a successful business is to have people who are passionate about their work, and we must develop that in some form or other. It is well known that with the economic crisis, businesses have cut back on further training for employees. Therefore, I would like the Government to consider a tax break for companies, especially SMEs, which send their employees for further training. That is something we should do something about.

There should be more financial support for private universities in terms of provision for further education, which may play a part in tackling youth unemployment. We need to realise that people are going to move much more to online education. I am not sure we are doing enough in that area. The whole area of online education is going to be very important in the future. Mr. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School is the author of "The Innovative University", and he predicts wholesale bankruptcies over the next decade in standard universities if we do not exploit the online market. This is also the thinking of the Brazilian Government, which provides a 10% subsidy to private colleges, with the obvious payback that they have a more educated workforce. I would be interested to hear if we can do something in this area to encourage online education.

Senator O'Donnell spoke clearly about apprenticeships. We need to get young people closer to the job market and to be instilled with a work ethic from a younger age. Our system encourages people to stay in education for an awfully long time, and Senator O'Donnell touched on that well. Universities benefit financially from people who stay on and do master's degrees or PhDs, but this often is not beneficial to the young people in getting a job. Practical skills are much more desirable to employers in the future. We have to learn from countries that are successful in apprenticeships and we talk a lot about Germany, but in Denmark selected schoolchildren spend two six month stints to work as apprentices in companies with four or five weeks at school in between. The Danish system has been described as follows.

Companies turn teenagers into adults: they get responsibility, trust, use expensive machinery, play a meaningful role and gain self-confidence...They learn the values of adults. You can teach that at school but you cannot teach it first hand. Some things can only be implicitly understood from experience.

I think we can do an awful lot more about apprenticeships.

In the past few years, South Korea created a network of vocational "meister schools" - meister is the German word for master craftsman - to reduce the country's shortage of machine workers and plumbers. The Government pays the students' room and board, as well as their tuition. We have a massive shortage of computer professionals here. Should we be considering something similar to address that particular shortage? Much can be done. Rather than trying to invent something new, let us see what is being done elsewhere. There are enough examples around the world of things from which we can learn.

I encourage the Minister of State in what he is doing, and I would like to see a lot more of it and more innovative thinking.