Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House and thank him for making time available to us. It is a great excitement for me to speak for the first time in the actual Seanad Chamber.

I begin by congratulating the innovation. I am very happy that the Department includes in its name the further education element because it is instrumental. I founded a college of further education and vocational training and it is instrumental for people’s development in their workplace and, also, to be able to come back to have modular training is a great innovation. The support and announcements by the Department in that regard have been great. I want to pay tribute to QQI, as did the Minister, Deputy Harris, in his speech. It has adapted, pivoted and worked very well in maintaining standards in education throughout this Covid-19 process, this whole nightmare of the last six months. Changing the modality of training, while still maintaining standards, is quite an extraordinary achievement.

I very much welcome the apprenticeships. We were recently in Burke Joinery in Ballyfermot and they particularly welcomed the role of apprenticeships and to have that conduit of building skills into the workplace. We really need that. We have seen a dearth of apprenticeships over the last ten years and to have an intentionality around the Department in the provision of 10,000 places, and to encourage young people to go down a different career path that is not points-driven to begin with, is to be very much commended.

My other points for the Minister are rather pedestrian when I compare them to those of my colleagues in the Seanad. I have three things that I appeal to the Department to consider. We have a cohort of students at present who are going through the appeals process for the leaving certificate. Some may require to sit the leaving certificate examination again in November. That is a whole issue which I will raise with the Minister, Deputy Foley, this afternoon. We now have that group of students, and we also have 2019 students who in good faith postponed their application to college for this year and, as a consequence, have been prejudiced by the sudden increase in leaving certificate points and how these points have been arrived at. Both of those groups are now going to be inhibited and impeded from entering college this year. I am appealing to the Department to give some consideration to some sort of stepped means of access into this academic year, given that these students cannot travel abroad and there are limited work opportunities for them. Perhaps we could consider an additional capacity of some sort. I acknowledge that there already has been additional capacity added to the system. As we change how college places are being delivered, perhaps there is some means by which that additional capacity could be added. Perhaps it could be done through pre-courses or some such means of addressing these students, so that in January we could have another group accepted into year one of college.

My other point is to do with the disability access routes to education. I have had a number of representations on this where people have made the application at the material time required by the CAO, at the same time they make the application for their disability access route to education status. Consequently, when they sit down to calculate their CAO options and what their preferential choices will be, it may perhaps be based on achieving or being granted that status, and thereby being able to access courses which they will be able to get on a slightly lower points basis by virtue of their status.However, the two people who approached me subsequently found that their status was rejected and they had to reappraise their CAO application process. I do not know whether that is universal or unique to these two individuals, and Senator Hoey might assist me on that, but if that is the case it seems to me that having a system where people could be pre-certified regardless of whether they achieve their status and then achieve the CAO place it would be a far less stressful process.