Feargal Quinn (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I do not want to get involved in the question of the teachers' dispute, although I know that around the world, there are so many areas, countries, provinces and states where teachers are demanding the right to assess their pupils. I want to talk about education. I attended the awards for the leaving certificate applied. This is a reminder of the leaving certificate applied, which is now 19 years old and has done a fantastic job. I fear that the Government is not allocating the leaving certificate applied the attention that it needs. The leaving certificate applied is a different leaving certificate inasmuch as it values the other abilities and not just academic abilities. These youngsters - when I say "youngsters", I mean older teenagers - have achieved the ability to succeed, even though they might not be very academically bright. At the age of five, six, ten or 12, they were regarded as not being very bright and were told to stay at the back of class. Suddenly, at the age of 15 or 16, they discover that they have huge talent and ability, gain in confidence and show that confidence.

The reason I mention this is that there are jobs that are vacant. I have just come from a meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation in which we spoke about the fact that there are 7,000 vacancies at the moment. There were 7,000 vacancies two or three years ago, but these are 7,000 different vacancies. The reason is that sometimes we do not train people to do exactly the right thing. I believe we can train them. There are many examples in which this has been done very well. Springboard is just one example of a system under which people with one particular skill that is no longer needed move to a different type of skill. Those 7,000 vacancies are not the same 7,000 vacancies that were there in the past, but they are there, and we can concentrate our efforts on that. We are doing some of what is required, so let us make sure we do an awful lot more. I believe it is worthwhile to concentrate on this.