The issue adverted to below concerns the thousands of students attending Further Education courses throughout the country and as such I thought that perhaps it was worth highlighting the Ministers failure to cater for Further Education in the recent Book of Estimates:

The publication of the Government’s spending estimates has confirmed that a plan to initiate reform of the further education sector in the school year 2007/08 has been scrapped. This is bitterly disappointing to a sector where hopes had risen that, after twenty years of successful growth, it might finally receive official recognition.

Three long years ago the Government published the results of an investigation into the sector, known as the McIver Report. The report is an objective, evidence-based review specifying what the sector needs.

Currently, over twenty thousand students attend PLC/Further Education colleges. At half the size of the total student population in the universities and institutes of technology, that figure represents a sizeable chunk of the education system. The colleges provide vocational education to school leavers and adults preparing for employment mainly in the service industries.

In the past State investment in vocational education has proved a beneficial use of tax payers money. Socially and economically it paid dividends to the whole society as when pupils in vocational schools were permitted to sit for the Leaving Cert, and later when regional technical colleges (now the institutes of technology) were developed.

In the light of all this can the Minister for Education and Science, Mary Hanafin, and the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen, kindly explain why their continued neglect of our sector may not be deemed wilful misgovernment?