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THERE IS ALMOST a “national obsession” with the CAO points system, according to Further Education Minister Simon Harris, who urged people to look around the new enhanced CAO website which now includes Further Education and Apprenticeship options for school leavers.
The CAO website went live today at 12pm.
Speaking this morning, the minister said “it’s nearly this national obsession we have with the points race, filling in the form, and the anxiety and mental health impact, I mean, quite horrific the stress and strain we put on our young people at 17 years of age,” he said.
Harris said young people are told to ‘fill out this form and tell me what you want to do with the rest of your life’, which he said puts a lot of pressure on students.
“Of course, that’s not the way it is. I’m not intending to be flippant, that’s often the way it comes across to 17 year olds,” he said.
“I mean, it’s okay not to know with great certainty what you want to do. And what’s the harm in saying I want to take a year of trying to find out and from a cost point of view, from a location point of view, the benefit of ETBs [Educational Training Boards] is they’re in every town and village in Ireland.
ETBs offers education and training programmes around the country.
“You can actually take the year and say – Cavan College, I think I’d like to do law. I’m going to do a year of pre-law and sample it, and then see if it’s for me,” he said.
Harris agreed that there is a need to tackle the sort of stigma there may be in schools and among teachers who might not see a PLC course or an apprenticeship as an option for their students.
The minister said there is a huge need for a skilled workforce that will help deliver the housing and climate targets set by the government.
He said politicians in the Dáil and around the Cabinet table talk about housing but “none of us are going to build any… none of us are going to retrofit your home”.
“So who do people think are going to do these things? It’s going to be the talented people in this country, who are passionate about wanting to solve housing, who are passionate about our climate,” he said.
While he said he would absolutely never tell anybody what they should do after school, he would encourage young people to explore the many opportunities that there are, and to get involved in both the construction sector and the green economy.
New apprenticeships are coming on stream, he said, stating that they recently launched the country’s first apprenticeship in wind turbine maintenance, something he said wouldn’t have been seen as a viable job in Ireland only a few years ago.
New apprenticeships in roof cladding, scaffolding and quantity surveying are also due to be announced.
“Sometimes we think of a very narrow view of what apprenticeships are. But you can actually do a Masters through an apprenticeship. So you could be working on a building site today and you could decide, ‘I want to keep going here, maybe I need to keep going, I need to keep bringing in an income, but I also want to upskill,’” he said.
When put to the minister that some young people might choose to emigrate when they qualify, the minister said his message to any young apprentice qualifying is “we really need you”.
“I suppose this is a national call, for all of us to step up and do everything that we can to solve what are probably the two biggest crises, apart from Covid, in our time – housing and climate,” he said.
Harris said the guarantee the government can give to young people is there is a pipeline of projects planned and the largest ever amount of funding committed to public investment in housing.
“You won’t be idle, and you won’t be out work,” he said.
CAO applicants should get their application number and submit any additional information required of them in advance of the 1 February at 5pm.
All applications for further education and apprenticeships will continue to be made through the traditional channels, though applicants will be able to navigate to these channels from the CAO website.
The freephone number available for guidance on apprenticeships is 1800 794 487 and will go live today. It will be open 12pm-6pm Monday-Friday.
To apply to CAO go to www.cao.ie and click on ‘Apply’.
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The government has sent a clear message to young people in Ireland. Earn over 100k to afford basic accommodation or get out. When they have ‘affordable’ properties on the market for 600k there is no future for a lot of graduates
@Ger Finch: You do realise there is homes outside Dublin. I don’t earn over 100k and I’ve bought a new build in Wicklow that should be ready in January. 30 minute drive to the city centre, A Dublin bus that goes through every hour. Homes are available if people learn there is no right to live close to mammy and daddy.
@Roy Dowling: living close to mammy and daddy isn’t why workers want to live in the city they work in. Do you think that’s true of immigrants?
Of course now that you’ve moved outside Dublin any house building in Dublin will cause you to regret your purchase.
we can’t house everybody who can’t buy in Dublin up the mountains. And If tens or hundred of thousands of people buy in Wicklow then Wicklow becomes as expensive as Dublin (if it isn’t already) then the next group are in Wexford, or something. All of this costs the environment and the mental health of the commuter. We need higher density inside the m50.
@john smith iv: There’s more than Wicklow where people can buy. Wicklow is where I choose to buy doesn’t mean it suited everyone. No new housing developments in Dublin will cause me regret. Agreed we need to build higher density inside the M50. But that won’t happen because the people who want to end the housing crisis are the same people who don’t want new homes of apartments build near them and object to everything.
@Roy Dowling: yeh I know that, Roy. I mentioned Wexford. Maybe eventually workers can all move to Kilkenny. Then Kerry.
Better solution – build more houses within the M50
@john smith iv: how many counties border Dublin? Again I agree more houses are needed in within the m50. Again the problem is anyone who lives within the m50 don’t want more houses near them. If someone plans a 7 storey apartment block it’s rejected as it’s out of character with the area. Traffic is already bad blah blah blah. Maybe ask the people within the m50 where it build the new homes they don’t want near them? See what they say.
@Roy Dowling: you’re totally generalizing there. An awful lot of people can’t afford a home anywhere. A lot more are being crippled by high rents. They could start though by enforcing a vacant property tax. There are literally 100s of empty apartments in Dublin with landlords (mostly institutional) waiting for the “market” to rebound. Shouldn’t be allowed.
@john smith iv: no. We need decentralisation. No more companies setting up in Dublin. Instead put the work in Donegal, Sligo. Tipperary Leitrim. Etc.
Modern life is such a money racket.
Spend years in college to get a half decent job, spend most of your earnings on rent to some lad who inherited a house or bought when they were cheap
Buy a house of your own, spend years paying bank interest to some bigshot who is just sunning himself in a hammock tied between two palm trees in Barbados
Spend about half your income on tax that just gets squandered on a massive national debt and overpriced crony contractors like the children’s hospital.
Government makes sure to keep you under pressure by charging you property tax, sending the cost of fuel through the roof and artificially keeping property prices high through onerous planning and zoning regulations. There would be no housing problems in this country if it wasn’t for the government preventing new houses being built or if they gave permission for people to live in prefabricated houses
@Quiet Goer: …spot on
..artificially keeping property prices high through onerous planning and zoning regulations. There would be no housing problems in this country if it wasn’t for the government preventing new houses being built or if they gave permission for people to live in prefabricated houses.
https://www.change.org/p/irish-referendum-on-family-home-special-status
As a lecturer, I can tell you Mr. Harris why there is a “national obsession” with the CAO system. It is because you and your Government contribute the second lowest funding to Third Level education in the entire OECD, just ahead of Russia at the bottom; the resulting effect being there are insufficient resources to increase places in Third Level which would reduce points. Resources such as sufficient staff, lecture theatres, laboratories, equipment for said laboratories, class rooms, improved library facilities, sufficient books, sufficient canteen facilities. The list goes on.
@Kevin Farrell: do we want to increase places though? We already have degree inflation and there are loads of graduates out there who can’t land a job in their area. Some courses are definitely worth it and there’s demand for those skills but there’s a lot of courses that we could do with less graduates in.
So we’ll create a level playing field by subsidising private schools with taxpayer money (€20million) a year and not tackling black market grinds.
@Peter McGlynn: sshhhh don’t let the teachers hear you say that
@Peter Roche: Gotta supplement somehow in rip off Ireland. Don’t hate the player.
@Peter McGlynn: the points system, for all its faults, is free of nepotism.
The Leaving Cert is little short of systematic abuse. It is responsible for a significant number number of excellent students developing anxiety that lasts long after the CAO offers.
What are the other national obsessions ? Property prices would be top of that list, hospital waiting lists, crippling personal taxation, woeful public services, aloof & dysfunctional government, etc. with a few more pints this list will get longer.
@Jules: Begrudging
@Jules: dead right
@Jules: The Weather
Who would want to work on a site these days, treated like shīt by the companies and struggle to get paid the legal rate.
There’ll be a severe lack of tradesmen over the next ten years and those that have qualified recently will be in Australia by Xmas next year.
@SJ: there is a severe lack of tradesmen now. Typical of the government to talk about something for so long it compounds the problem instead of tackling it early.
There was a time when you could leave school after completing your Inter Cert (Junior Cert equivalent now) and start an apprenticeship in a trade. Then when the jobs stagnated in the 90s the sitting government encouraged parents to keep kids in school to achieve leaving cert and further education. This, in reality was to massage the live register figures.
The result was a sharp reduction in trades people. 18 is a bit old in my own opinion to start an apprenticeship. Giving young people the opportunity to leave after Junior Cert to take an apprenticeship would take a lot of pressure off the CAO as not all kids are academically minded. Time to stop wrapping kids in cotton wool to suit the government.
Some of the best tradesmen I know left school early to learn their craft.
Kids have no idea what the want to do, but they race for points. I’ve had people in their final year at Uni say “I don’t think I wana do this’ lol!… Try not to get caught in the race for grades. If you really are following your ambitions, they will ultimately mean nothing.
Harris has all the answers but not in college o my god sorry politician answered
It’s the system they created!!! 3rd leval has become a money making racket, masters and phds in nonsense, academia has destroyed knowledge.
It’s all about the points race to study for the lucrative professions in engineering, the physical sciences, medicine, business and law. School principals and others mouth the usual cliches about educating the full person at open days and prize days, but the pressure on teachers is on from different directions. Universities operate like businesses in a scramble of tempting advertising. Internationally in so-called democracies academic freedom itself is being crippled by groups of students and staff contending to impose rival correctnesses. Non-academically inclined school leavers might be better off embarking on apprenticeships.
Simon Harris. Further education minister with no further education.
If there is not enough people to build houses, we need to build robots to build houses. 3d printing houses seems like an alternative.
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