Northern Ireland's two teacher training colleges could train "hundreds more teachers", a conference on the Dearing Report on UK higher education has heard.
The principal of St Mary's College in Belfast, Father Martin O'Callaghan, said about 600 Northern student teachers go to British colleges because of a British government "cap" on numbers at the Catholic training college and its state equivalent, Stranmillis College. "They could all be trained here." He said the two Belfast colleges could also "train teachers for export".
England was crying out for teachers, yet could not get people with good A-level exam results to apply for teacher training. The students at the Belfast colleges had far better school-leaving results than their equivalents at English teacher training colleges.
Both colleges are also known to be discussing how they could diversify and offer non-teaching degrees in subjects like English, history, geography, science, art and music. They argue they already have the facilities to raise their student numbers in this way, from 650 to nearly 1,200.
In this, they are responding to the conclusion of the Dearing Report that more Northern students would study at home instead going to Britain if there were more third-level college places locally. It says the Belfast colleges of education could diversify "away from their monotechnic status, as many of their counterparts in Great Britain have already done".
Sir George Quigley, Northern Ireland's representative on the Dearing Committee, said its report had stated "bluntly" that post-18 education in the North "should be seen as a whole and planned as a whole". He was an enthusiastic supporter of Dearing's recommendation that the British government should set up an overall Tertiary Education Forum for Northern Ireland, which would oversee two funding councils for the higher education and further education sectors.
"What is important is that, as in the rest of the UK, a funding body should be interposed between the government and the higher education institutions." Sir George, who is chairman of Ulster Bank, and a former Secretary of the North's Department of Economic Development, said that on a recent visit to Silicon Valley in California he had been told that skills shortages are driving companies there to seek investment locations elsewhere.
"That puts educational excellence at a premium. Northern Ireland, given its scale, should be able to outpace any other region in its ability to deliver human capital of superb quality. Higher and further education are clearly pivotal in the region's ability to capitalise on this opportunity."
He said that in the light of Dearing's recommendation that the British government should substantially increase the number of higher education places in Northern Ireland, the third-level sector had two options.
It could either expand proportionately to match Scottish higher education provision by aiming to "import" a significant number of students, which would result in 12-15,000 extra student places in the North. Or it could decide only to cater for those Northern students who "unwillingly" go outside the region to study, which would require an extra 5,000 places.