BY the year 2011 the proportion of the labour force with primary education only will have dropped to below 10 per cent. Meanwhile, the proportion with a third level education will have risen to approach 40 per cent, if the ESRI's latest projections hold true. This represents a significant advance on the situation in 1991 where more than one fifth of the labour force had only a primary education and just 20 per cent had a third level education.
The predictions are based on the assumption that there will be a small increase in participation at third level with a small reduction in the numbers leaving school with only a Junior Cert - at present between 40 and 50 per cent of those leaving the education system have experienced third level education while more than 80 per cent have reached Leaving Cert standard.
This is good news for most people. However, it is assumed also that the numbers leaving school with no qualification will remain at their present low levels. This, surely, is an unacceptable assumption. If these levels, although low, do not fall, the gap between the successful graduates of the education system and those who leave school early will widen even further, reinforcing the notion of a two tier society.
The link between lack of qualifications and employment prospects is well established. We now know the rising economic tide will not raise all boats. Those at the bottom of the pile - the long term unemployed and the early school leavers - are likely to remain there unless significant interventions are made.
The ESRI report notes that much of the policy advice on structural unemployment has concentrated on the need to reduce the numbers leaving school with no qualifications. Considerable success has been achieved but the numbers who are leaving without even a Junior Cert, while small, represent a fairly concentrated group with multiple social problems. The report states, pessimistically, that further progress with this group is likely to prove difficult in the future - next week E&L will carry an indepth report on the situation in northeast inner Dublin.
Despite the difficulties, the ESRI report recommends that this group of students be targeted as a priority. Children now comprise the largest segment of the population in poverty and some 15 per cent continue to suffer from serious educational disadvantage.
CONSIDERATIONS of equity aside, Tony Fahey, senior research officer with the ESRI, writing in The Irish Times last Wednesday, said that investment in children was one which had paid off at a rate which would satisfy the most flinty eyed of capitalists. The lesson of that experience must now be applied in full. "Future social investment must incorporate all children and it must extend beyond schools to take in the whole childhood environment, particularly family. Only if that is done will Ireland manage to eliminate the all too strong vestiges of profligacy which are still to be found in the way it treats its children," he said.
The expansion of the education system is a fairly recent development. In the immediate postwar years all of the countries in northern Europe, with the exception of the Republic of Ireland, reformed and expanded their systems. It was another 20 years before we were to recognise the importance of investment in education.
A strategy of investing in education has been pursued consistently by successive governments since the late 1960s. This began with the publication of Investment in Education in 1966 and the introduction of free second level education in 1967 a decision which the ESRI describes as the single most important change in education policy in the past 30 years.
The policy of upgrading the education system takes many years to change society and the economy according to the ESRI. In its Medium Term Review 1997-2003 published last week it warns that education cannot be seen as "a quick fix" solution to economic and social problems.
The influence of improved education levels in the population is ubiquitous affecting almost all demographic behaviour from marriage and fertility rates to growing participation by women in the labour force and migration patterns.
The effect of past education investment is still filtering through the current adult population with the first beneficiaries of free education still only in their forties. Changes are continuing with participation rates in third level increasing significantly in the first five years of the 1990s. This has raised our participation rates in education up to the levels of some of the more developed economies and above those currently experienced in Britain and Northern Ireland.
"With both education and training, greater flexibility is required so that progression from one level to another is facilitated rather than obstructed, and more effective targeting of the long term unemployed, or those about to enter the situation, is required."
THE review stressed the contribution which improved education has made in enhancing the potential growth rate of the economy in the past, a role it will continue to play in the future. But, it states that education is not a very effective instrument for dealing with short term capacity problems in the labour market. It puts the ball back in the employers' court, suggesting that firms should provide increased training.
The report further states that in a rapidly developing economy it would be unwise to try and predict the precise skills needs more than a decade in advance, so the role of the education system is "to produce citizens who have a broad enough education that they will be able to adapt to the everchanging needs of a rapidly evolving society and economy. Those providing the necessary training in specific skills can build on this firm foundation."
