Education system ‘putting success at risk’

IRELAND’S future success is entirely dependent on an educational system that is not up to scratch, the chairman of BP and former head of the World Trade Organisation Peter Sutherland warned last night.

Mr Sutherland, who recently made a €4 million gift towards a new law school at University College Dublin, said our schools and colleges need to be benchmarked against Europe’s best.

“We don’t have the educational system that we think we have. I don’t think we are top of class on any level. At the end of the day our competitiveness is entirely dependent on our education system,” he said.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report into Ireland’s education system showed it has serious deficiencies while the evidence from the universities was unambiguous.

“Our universities are not at the top rank of universities but we fool ourselves about this,” he said, adding that we have poorly educated students, especially in mathematics and the sciences.

There were problems with the quality of students produced by the secondary schools. Some universities have to give additional training to students, especially those going into maths-based courses, he said.

The educational system had not changed since Ireland had massive unemployment and low GDP. But the country has changed and education needed to reflect this, he said.

There was a need to benchmark results in the Leaving Certificate against other countries, he added.

Mr Sutherland said he believed that young Irish people were great and they made up to a great extent for the inadequacies of the education system.

However, he suggested, the country was not producing enough engineers or scientists and getting this right would determine the future success of the economy.