Rose Conway-Walsh: Highlights apprenticeship crisis and nursing pathways

Thank you Minister and all of the witnesses for their contributions and I think we agree in an awful lot of what has been said and we certainly agree on the value of further education and apprenticeships but I think we do need to drop the idea that the main issue with it is the perception and snobbery around apprenticeships because I think that abdicates responsibilities for the impediments that need to be addressed within the apprenticeship and further education process. That might be the case for some people but it is not for most. We know that the further education system needs multi-year funding to provide the ability to plan strategically to know where people are and have greater freedom to provide the courses and the education that people in their communities want and need. I do welcome the new CAO website thing to include the FET options including the apprenticeship. Certainly that will be a step forward but critical pathways must be there for those who do not want to progress to higher education. When we look at it, it is quite stark really. Less than 5 per cent of almost 4,000 students that do the pre-nursing in further education get access to degree courses afterwards. That is a real, real problem that we need to address. Yes, it is simply not good enough, especially when we have the shortages of nurses that we have. Minister, you talk about enhancing the visibility of apprenticeships and I think that misses the point to an extent. Many people out there right now are trying to get an apprenticeship. I speak to them every day. I know of one person who just got an apprenticeship after trying for two years. One hundred and forty people interviewed for two years. One hundred and forty people interviewed for two apprenticeship places in that case. Now, the retrofitting targets that you mentioned mean that we will need 27,000 tradespeople working in this area in the coming years. We know exactly what we need. We only currently have about 18,000 craft apprenticeships in total. We are more on the waiting list, unable to access the training that they need. So, the process has been allowed to grind to a halt. Now, I know that Covid has been a big factor in that, but there were capacity issues before the pandemic. I think we need to be a real honest conversation about this as well. This is the only way we are going to be able to tackle what we need to. The so-called emergency response to the waiting list in 2020 was to allocate 12 million to address the backlog, but this was despite the fact that the backlog was actually saving the state over 16 million in the same year due to not paying many of the allowances. The response has been completely inadequate and has left the system in crisis. We also need to make sure that apprenticeships are there for people that want them. We should be leveraging the public procurement system by applying apprenticeship employment criteria for companies that want to apply for public contracts. We need to be very direct. We need to be very direct about this in ensuring that that is part of the conditions. There are many other issues around apprenticeships, but I am conscious of my time, Minister. I want to ask you a couple of things. What are the estimated savings created by the waiting lists for the state in 2021 as a result of the state paying out less allowances? I know you talk about the HEA funds, ICT and intra-entrepreneurship summer camps and I welcome that. Does this in any way suffice when we have so many second level schools not teaching computer science? Is it an objective of you, Minister and the Department and Government to ensure that all students in this day and age have an option to study computer science? I think that absolutely has to be our ambition and there has to be a timeline on that. In the changing environment that we have, I do not think it is acceptable that we can have schools without that option in terms of computer science. I want to refer to John Connor when you say to establish a systematic student counselling and career guidance. It is shameful that it is not there already. You know, we know from last year, even from research that we did with the college students, that one of the biggest impediments to them making the right choices at further and higher education was that they did not have any career guidance or they did not have sufficient career guidance. So, I just want to see how that is going to be fixed. I want to ask Andrew in terms of solace. We have areas like Bellihonis and County Mayo where you have an ETB training centre there. The community wants to make that into a vibrant training centre for the town, the town that has been decimated with banks leaving it and other things. And yet the community within the town want to have a cohort of well-trained people. And they want not huge funding, but they want some funding and some support in being able to turn the ETB centre into a place where apprenticeships for specific job opportunities within the town can be used. And I think that is a way of us really reviving, you making use of buildings that are not being used and reviving our towns as well and building up that labour capital that we need in all of these towns to be able to attract industries into them as well. So, I think we need a much broader thinking, but we need to unblock the things that we need to unblock. Finally, I just have to say this in terms of pathways and pathways for nurses. There should be no reason why people cannot go on and do an apprenticeship, but know that they can next go on to do a degree. They can next go on, they can go right up to PhD level. And that needs to be made clear to them. And the Good Friday Agreement Committee last week, we talked about cancer research and oncology. And you will know, Minister, there are the most brilliant oncology nurses. Why do not they go on to be consultants? What blockages are there to stop them going on to be consultants? So, there are lots of things that we need to address. And I have very little time for answers, but maybe you can answer some of them throughout the discussion. I will give them two or three minutes. Mr Harris, and then we will just ask a quick comment off of one or two, Mr Condon maybe. I am sure that it would not be intentional. I have loads of questions and I have very little time to answer them. But the stuff I want to both agree and disagree with Deputy Conway Walsh on. I mean, the first one, I suppose, and I do not think you intended like this, but I definitely will not drop the idea, which I think was your phrase, that the issue or part of the issue around apprenticeships is definitely not the lack of information or a snobbery or a cultural issue, because I genuinely believe it is. I mean, I remember meeting, and that is not abdicating responsibility, because I accept it is only a part of it. I met Zoe, the 1,000th female registered apprentice in Ireland. She is an accounting technician in Cork. No one ever told Zoe about apprenticeships. I did not know anything about them. Her brothers in schools became aware of it. She was not aware of it. She went to an old girls' school. Zoe said if I had been made aware of this much earlier, my career pathway would have been easier. I met Jack in Cavan. Jack got his first place in the CAO and started his degree. I absolutely hated it. Jack dropped out and did his pre-law course in Cavan College of Further Education, or Cavan College as it is called. If only I had known about that first, Jack said to me, it would have been an awful lot more straightforward. Karen in Sligo College of Further Education. These are real people. Karen was gutted when she did not get the points she wanted in her CAO. Karen went to Sligo, did a year in Sligo College, and is now going on to St. Angela's College to do her degree. She felt better developed as a person. I genuinely believe passionately that the pathways, the information, the knowledge that we are giving our students at that 16, 17-year-old age is key. That is absolutely not in contradiction with the point that Deputy Conway Welch validly makes about the need for us to up our game as well in terms of what we are doing. I fully accept that. There are a couple of things that we are doing and we won't have time to get into all of them. In terms of increasing the number of available apprentices, which I think availability was a core part of your question, there are two very key actions taking place next year. The first is, from January, for the very first time, a core financial payment to any employer who takes on a new apprentice of around €2,000 per apprentice per year. The hospitality sector and restaurant associations are looking for this for years, so a financial incentive for an employer to take on an apprentice. Secondly, there has been hypocrisy in the public sector on this. We wag our finger about apprenticeships and give out about it. The entire public sector, which I think employs around 300,000 people, on average takes on 80 apprentices a year. That is a darn disgrace. There is a target in the Apprenticeship Action Plan of 750 a year by 2025. By next July, the quotas of who is doing what across councils, agencies and departments will be brought to Cabinet. On the apprenticeship backlogs, the wait times and your response, Mr Brownlee will comment on that. I would just say I am very satisfied with the plan they have in place. I think the only constraint, in fairness, has been an ability to increase the capacity in terms of public health. I think we are now in a good place on that. Any funds they have required, any more funds they will require, will be forthcoming on that. I think clearing that backlog, and I accept it is not all COVID, but it is a chance for a good to come from COVID in terms of removing that backlog once and for all. To agree on pre-nursing, I think the Deputy is entirely right. When I talk about, and Mr Brownlee talks about, this new portal on Friday being the first step towards an integrated third-level system, one of the very next steps has to be, if you go on to do your pre-nursing or your pre-anything else, and you get the very top marks there, there has to be a linkage. I fully agree with the Deputy on that. I am fully committed to delivering on that as part of our integration of the tertiary education system. Mr Brownlee might comment on some of the specifics, Chairman, around the wait times and the backlog. I am very conscious that there are no speakers coming in as well. Just to cover the apprenticeship waiting list and don't come back on the other two. Okay, no problem. I suppose on the waiting list, I think we have to be conscious that it is only from September, it is only from last month, that ETVs and higher education institutions have been allowed to return to full on-site capacity. There is a major emergency plan, and I totally agree with the Deputy. It is an emergency, and capacity was an issue before all this started, but it is many, many times worse. The emergency plan involves increasing the instructor base significantly, and you will see there is an ongoing campaign to recruit 100 additional staff into ETVs in the next couple of months. We have moved the entire delivery model for phase two of off-the-job training from three intakes to two intakes a year. So that effectively increases capacity by 50%. There has been 20 million capital investment to expand workshop capacity across both FET and HE. And as I said, the key thing is we are actually back on-site. So until September this year, for nine of the first 12 months of COVID, the workshops were closed. We couldn't actually run the training. For the period until September, they were operating at about 50% capacity. So now they are ramped up, and now we are turning the corner. And already you have seen the level of waiting list go from, I think, 11,800 at the end of July to 9,779 at the end of September, because we have been able to get people back in training. So we believe the corner has turned, but there has certainly been no letting up. And we do completely accept we are in an emergency situation, Deputy. Okay, thank you very much.