For almost 15 years, John Hayden has been secretary of the Higher Education Authority. He first joined the organisation, which employs 25 people and is at the heart of tertiary education planning, at the time of its establishment in 1973.

The first chairman was a former secretary of the Department of Education, Traolach O Raifeartaigh, a scholarly man keen on reading texts about St Patrick, while the first secretary was Jim Dukes, father of Alan.

While the chairman charted policy direction, the secretary got on with the job of implementing changes on the ground. As Hayden recalls, "Jim Dukes, who turned 80 recently, is a very warm character with great dynamism. He was a commandant in the FCA to which he devoted very weekend."

Early on at the HEA there was a lot of donkey work to be done, putting in place administrative systems for the country's universities and institutes of higher education. This would have been grist to John Hayden's mill, having previously worked in RTE where one of his jobs as an organisation methods manager was to find out how much it cost the station per hour to produce the various programmes.

In his life Hayden has enjoyed a brace of different careers. When he left school in 1957, he joined Dublin Corporation's housing department. "People would queue up at one of several hatches," he recalls. "They would be asked detailed personal questions. The people beside them could hear the answers. But the system was above board. Nobody got any favours or suffered from bias."

Hayden grew up in Ranelagh, Dublin. His father earned his living from the family hackney company based in Donnybrook. He died when John was 10 years old, leaving his mother to rear six young children.

"It was tight enough, but my childhood and adolescence was entirely secure," he recalls. It was the Fifties. Times were hard, but expectations were low. He attended Synge Street which then attracted pupils from as far afield as Maynooth and Greystones.

His history teacher, Tommy O'Rourke, was a particularly influential figure, stressing the need for the pupils to learn maturity while at school. Unlike most teachers, he would refer to the painful Civil War period, "but you could never quite discover which side he took".

Synge Street had an excellent track record in maths and science and Hayden was a keen student of these subjects. The school's long-serving chemistry teacher, Paddy O'Hanlon, managed to produce a string of people who went on to earn Ph Ds.

Outside the classroom, Hayden developed unusual literary interests. His favourite authors included Joyce, Camus and Faulkner as well as that most prolific of writers, Anthony Trollope. "I was reading Joyce at 17, but I didn't advertise the fact. I never really took to Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. I preferred The Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and Dubliners. The down-at-heel, seedy atmosphere of much of the Dublin of the 1890s captured by Joyce was still to be found in the Fifties."

After a couple of years with the Corporation, Hayden went to work with the ESB's rural electrification division, before joining the home heating company, McMullans Kosangas, where he got his first proper taste of the private sector.

He also found time in his twenties to take an external economics degree from the University of London. Taking the correspondence route left time for extensive youth club actvities.

Hayden is a strong believer in the importance of continuing education. This will be a key priority for the secretary and for the incoming HEA chairman, Don Thornhill, coming in fresh from the Department of Education and Science.

"In the future, this area will be the key area of focus," says Hayden. "While the numbers going into third level are rising fast, I can't see everyone going into higher education willy nilly, straight from school. We need to develop ladders for people at work who want to go back into the education system."

It's likely that the old pattern under which second-level students proceed straight to college rather than taking a number of years off from study will persist. There will be further consolidation within the system. "We've begun in recent years to see the need for balance between the different levels of higher education, between certificate and diploma, degree and postgraduate courses.

"We will have to watch demand for particular skills. We slipped back in the area of technician availability, for example, though action is now being taken to remedy the situation."

THE secretary remains a firm believer in the importance of a rounded education. He and his wife, Gemma, encouraged their three children to develop their musical skills. Two have kept up the violin and have played in orchestras. "It's a good training. It gives people discipline."

Their elder daughter, Aine, is a manager in a cafe in Temple Bar, Dublin, while his son, Eoin, is studying for a postgraduate degree in chemical engineering at Cambridge. Neasa, their youngest daughter, is still at school.

While closely involved in the education of his children, Hayden found the new maths beyond him. "I tended to withdraw at that point." Even our most distinguished education experts, it seems, have their limits . . .