A SENIOR school manager has called on the Government to provide adequate resources to allow Vocational Education Committees (VECs) offer an “alternative to the emigrant ship’’.
Michael Moriarty, general secretary of the Irish Vocational Education Association (IVEA) said young people deserved the opportunity to stay at home and prepare for the economic upturn.
He said while a limited range of training initiatives for all skill levels has been launched in other sectors, the “vocational sector has not been able to expand our educational programmes to any significant degree, and certainly not enough to meet the unprecedented numbers of unemployed clamouring for places on VEC programmes to allow them to retrain or up-skill.” He told the IVEA annual conference that despite the worst economic crisis in living memory, there had been little added capacity afforded the vocational educational sector to “allow it to adequately respond to the needs of those seeking to reskill or retrain through the further education route”.
