Bosses prepare plans for post-VEC world

The incoming bosses of the boards replacing vocational education committees (VEC) have been selected and have started to plan next year’s changeover.

The 16 chief executives were picked from among the 19 full-time CEOs of the 33 city and county VECs, which will be replaced by education and training boards (ETBs) early next year. The most senior serving CEOs were given first choice of the new body they wanted to head up.

The three unassigned full-time CEOs will be redeployed in education or the wider public sector. The 14 who have been acting CEOs on rolling short-term contracts will return to the jobs they previously held in the VECs, but could be offered a vacant CEO’s position.

The first meetings between the CEO-designates and Department of Education officials took place this week, with legislation to create the ETBs to be published by Education Minister Ruairi Quinn later this month. Ahead of its enactment, each CEO-designate must work with the VECs which will come under their management in ETBs to facilitate the mergers.

Under pay scales agreed through the Labour Relations Commission, six of the new CEOs — at the ETB for Cork (merging its city and county VECs), Dublin and Dún Laoghaire, Kildare and Wicklow, Limerick and Clare (including the merger of Limerick city and county VECs), Louth and Meath, and Waterford and Wexford (including Waterford city and county merger) — will be on salaries ranging from €107,171 to €129,854.

Those who head nine of the other ETBs will be on a salary range of €102,220 to €123,648, while City of Dublin VEC chief executive Jacinta Stewart will continue on her salary scale of €127,588 to €145,952 at the City of Dublin ETB.

The Department of Education expects the savings on CEO salaries will be €2.1m a year, as acting CEOs revert to lower-salaried former jobs. The VECs have a total annual budget of about €1bn, which funds the running of 254 second-level vocational schools and community colleges. They are also patrons of the multi-denominational community national school sector and have responsi-bility for further education, adult education, and training programmes.

The ETBs will also take over responsibility for FÁS training centres and their 750 staff, under the guise of the Solas further education and training authority.