Summary of ideas submitted in the Education category…

• Offer citizenship to any non-EU national who completes a PhD in Ireland in pre-defined fields.
• Offer educational/training opportunities during the holiday periods in schools.
• Offset reduction in special needs assistants by creating courses for these children over the summer break.
• Open a sewing school.
• Open a University in the Southeast
• Open more Technical secondary schools
• Oral and practical exams in second level schools should be held, at least partially, during school holiday time.
• Place a greater focus on maths, possibly through extra-curricular training workshops and summer camps.
• Place an electronic voting machine in each secondary school in the country.
• Pool education resources - some rural schools are overcrowded while others have free capacity.
• Promote e-learning: it’s cheap and easy.
• Promote mentoring between Generation Y (born after 1979) and the Baby Boomers/Generation X.
• Property Developers should build schools in tandem with new housing estates.
• Provide better career guidance services.
• Provide instructions in ethics to all second and third level students.
• Provide more assistance for start-up IT companies. Enterprise Ireland has an excellent programme that it runs in conjunction with the Dublin Institute of Technology that could be used as the model.
• Provide on-line courses for those on the Live Register. This could be provided by the NUI and charge nominal fees.
• Provide state scholarships to students wishing to study at the world’s top universities; the proviso is that these students commit themselves to returning to Ireland on qualification.
• Provide tax breaks for companies who send employees on management development courses
• Provide tax rebates for individuals commencing third level education.
• Raise the primary school entry age to 5.
• Rather than building more classrooms with the consequent high embodied energy and carbon emissions, we should operate a shift system that starts classes in staggered cycles starting at 8.00am and finishing at 6.00pm.
• Reduce registration fees for science and technology courses by 75%.
• Reduce teacher’s hours.
• Reduce the number of schools in rural areas. Pool existing resources to create more efficient schools.
• Reduce the number of third level educational institutes and focus the remaining colleges on a number of core specialist areas.
• Reduce the numbers of school books needed and concentrate on web-based learning, CDs and DVDs.
• Reintroduce third level fees alongside a really well-funded grants system to encourage third level access for the disadvantaged.
• Remove fees for third level science courses.
• Remove the condition of having to be 12 months unemployed in order to qualify for back to education allowances
• Replace kids’ school books with memory cards/USBs.
• Require all young people who are unemployed to undertake training rather than signing onto the Live Register.
• Resource teachers should be provided after school hours.
• Reuse existing schoolbooks. Workbooks are wasting money.
• Revamp the Leaving cert syllabus.