The Minister of State in charge of adult education, youth affairs and school transport is the experienced, hard-working, outspoken and occasionally controversial politician Willie O'Dea. He has been given a number of problematic areas to deal with.
Adult education is notoriously under-resourced, and the last Minister had little interest in it. O'Dea has promised a Green Paper by the end of the year on what he calls "the Cinderella of the education system. It's so unwieldy I don't know anybody involved in it who is aware of everything that's happening. There are so many bodies: the VECs, the Departments of Health and Social Welfare, the universities. The first thing you've got to do is put a structure on it."
He has already incurred the wrath of the VECs for saying their adult education provision is "uneven" and questioning the value for money provided by some of them. He criticises the "mathematical formula" devised by the Department of Finance under which VEC adult education budgets are calculated per head of population, regardless of performance.
He is also critical of one of the more successful programmes, the Vocational Training Opportunities Scheme, whose aim is to help "the long term unemployed get back into the educational system, but which has a disproportionate number of younger people on it." He also worries that people leave VTOS to go to community employment schemes which pay better for shorter hours.
O'Dea's second area is youth services. Here he has already discovered that the last government's Youth Work Act, the first-ever legislation governing the State's youth services, is inoperable because it depends on the regional education boards proposed in that government's Education Bill, which are being scrapped. He is now preparing amending legislation.
His third area of responsibility, school transport, is another thorny one. The catchment areas and other arrangements for `bussing' rural children to school date from Donogh O'Malley's era in the late Sixties. The service has become increasingly more expensive and less efficient, and the volume of complaints from parents has risen sharply.
The Minister of State is now waiting for the latest of three reports in the past seven years before making any policy decisions. He accepts already that "a radical overhaul of the system is needed after 30 years."
