Ireland is in danger of falling behind other European countries which have recognised the economic importance of adult education and training, the Minister of State for Education, Mr Willie O'Dea, said at the publication of the Green Paper on Adult Education.
The paper recommends that the Government's top priority should be the implementation of a national adult literacy programme. "Failure to do so will not only seriously constrain the individual life chances of those affected, but it will also limit overall economic and social progress.
"In a technological society in which almost every aspect of life increasingly rests on implicit assumptions concerning literacy competence, low literacy levels of the scale prevalent in Ireland will serve to disengage an ever larger proportion of the national population from the daily life of society."
It cites "alarming" statistics like the OECD's findings that about 25 per cent of Irish people are at the lowest level of literacy, and participation in adult education and training is extremely low by international standards.
Mr O'Dea said he intended to treble the present very low figure of 5,000 people doing adult literacy courses over the next three to four years at a cost of about £10 million. He also spoke of extending the adult literacy channel operated for 10 hours a week by Tipperary FM to the whole State.
The Green Paper proposes a "back to education" initiative targeted at the nearly 640,000 people over 15 who have left school with less than upper secondary education.
This would involve the phased expansion of Youthreach, Post Leaving Certificate courses and the Vocational Training Opportunities Scheme (VTOS) for the adult unemployed, allowing "second chance" students to go back to education on a flexible, part-time, all-year-round basis. Courses would be offered free to the unemployed and medical-card holders.
A new executive agency of the Department of Education, the National Adult Learning Council, is proposed to co-ordinate policy for what has up to now been a notoriously fragmented and under-funded area.
Mr O'Dea said this would be a statutory body. Local adult education boards would report to the council. These would co-ordinate the countless governmental, partnership, voluntary and community bodies which provided adult education, he said. The VECs, currently the main deliverers of formal adult education, would be one of the bodies represented on the new boards.
More aspirationally, the Green Paper recommends nationwide guidance and counselling services for those involved in adult education; a comprehensive child-care programme which would allow more women to return to education; extending the programmes currently available to the unemployed to women in the home and others; the exploration of the feasibility of a programme of paid educational leave in order to upskill workers; and more funding and personnel for the vital, if badly under-resourced, community education sector, with its roots in disadvantaged communities.
It recommends that universities and institutes of technology introduce a system of mature-student quotas. Mr O'Dea said Ireland's performance in this area was "nothing short of abysmal". He compared the 5 per cent of mature student entrants to the Irish third-level system with the more than 50 per cent in the UK.
The Green Paper was welcomed yesterday by Aontas, the National Adult Literacy Agency, the Irish Vocational Education Association, the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland and the Teachers' Union of Ireland.
The Conference of Religious of Ireland said it hoped the Government would begin to address the "serious underfunding" of adult education in the next Budget.