Education for the future

Future talent

As a teacher you experienced first hand that children were not getting access to education to equip them with skills for the future. What do you think needs to change?

This issue is another one of the main reasons I left teaching, after I taught in the UK for a year I returned to Ireland and I became absolutely furious at how the system fails to prepare students for the future of work. ROTE learning is over. Kids are not coming out of school to work in factories- the future of work is remote, online and it requires a whole host of new skills that are not being taught. 

They do not need to memorise information in the same way as per the current exam structures- they need to be able to analyse information understand bias and contextualisation. It's a different skill set entirely and the fact that in Ireland the leaving cert is a final summative exam in some subjects that counts for 100% of the students result after a 3 hour exam and 2 years worth of work is simply criminal. 

In Ireland there are enormous issues with suicide and addiction in young people as per our population and in comparison to other european countries. The system fails in many ways to protect young people and give them opportunities to excel. 

We have all the tech giants of the world with their European base here and on average 11 devices per household yet many students up until covid have had little to no experience with online learning- which is not the use of powerpoint or snapchat as some may think. 

Of course for wealthier city schools many of these issues don't exist but once again vulnerable students are immediately placed at a disadvantage because of their postcode.

This is a failure of policy at the highest levels of government. 

At third level student are not competing with other irish students for jobs but with students from all over the world. At a recent business conference I attended one of the top recruitment firms in the world stated that they could not find Irish students to fill the jobs and had to recruit internationally. They explained that they were trying to work with third level students to get them to be qualified to do such technical roles but I believe it's too late to intervene at third level when students have already chosen a study path- the intervention needs to take place at secondary level. The system needs to be radically overhauled. 

Furthermore, so many third level courses are completely outdated under resourced and provide absolutely zero practical work knowledge. This has to change- education has many purposes but one of the most important is to ensure that students have job opportunities in the future- the current system is completely outdated and not forward thinking enough.