The Government is unlikely to achieve its target of having 90 per cent of 17- to 19-year-olds take the Leaving Certificate by the end of the century.
The Minister for Education admitted yesterday the present 82 per cent level had "probably plateaued". During his address to the ASTI annual convention in Tralee, Mr Martin said his Department was concentrating on how to increase the numbers.
He said the 90 per cent target had been public policy for "quite some time". But "the available data indicates that the completion rate has probably plateaued and is, at best, rising very marginally." He said the Government needed to refocus its efforts to push up this rate.
One factor in the shortfall was the current "good economic times" which encouraged children from poorer families to leave school to take up low-paid jobs with little prospect of advancement.
Employers of children who left school in this way before obtaining any qualification had a duty to act responsibly and ensure that their employees had access to some education or training up to at least age 18, the Minister said.
At the INTO congress in Ennis, Mr Martin's 10-month honeymoon relationship with the primary teachers' union appeared to be coming unstuck. The INTO general secretary, Senator Joe O'Toole, accused him of "wilfully ignoring" the urgency of the crisis in primary school funding and staffing.
Mr O'Toole said there was a worse gap between primary and post-primary funding now, in the booming late 1990s, than in the "bad times" of the early 1980s.
The congress will today almost certainly pass an emergency motion deploring the Minister's "inadequate response" to the "worsening problems of teacher shortages and inadequate funding", and threatening industrial action unless they are addressed.
Mr Martin told the INTO that following last week's agreement in the North, education would have to be central to the search for reconciliation in Ireland and "we must start in our schools." He said there was a need to move to "a new level of cross-Border interaction by schoolchildren."