Press Statement

Preasráiteas

11 January 2021

Go to release: Early Learning Care Graduate Outcomes 2013-2017

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (11 January 2021) published Early Learning Care Graduate Outcomes 2013-2017. The report analyses the Outcomes, Employment Sectors and Earnings of graduates who completed a course which is recognised as an Early Learning Care course.

Statistician in the Statistical Systems Co-ordination Unit Anthony Kiernan commented “Among 2017 graduates, 84% found substantial employment one year after graduation. This is an increase of 18 percentage points compared to 2013 graduates one year after graduation.

The findings also show that the most common sector for graduates was the ELC sector. In the first year after graduating, 73% of 2017 graduates were in this sector, up from 59% for those who graduated in 2013. A third of graduates who worked in the ELC Sector had more than one job in the first year after graduation.

The median weekly earnings among all 2017 graduates from ELC courses was €340. This varied according to the sector that graduates worked in, however. Graduates that found work in the ELC sector had median weekly earnings of €345, while those working in non-ELC Health and Education sectors had slightly higher earnings of €360 per week. Those working in all other sectors (neither ELC, nor Health or Education) had the lowest weekly earnings of €305 per week.

Earnings were found to depend strongly on the NFQ level of a graduate’s qualification. Among those graduating with a Level 8 degree in 2017 the median weekly earnings in the first year was €395, which was €100 per week greater than for those graduating with a Level 5 qualification in the same year.”

Commenting on the report, Senior Statistician Kieran Culhane said: “The analysis carried out in this report is based on the Educational Longitudinal Database (ELD), which is a framework for analysing graduate outcomes and learner pathways using administrative data. This framework is produced by matching datasets from the Education sector to other public-sector datasets which describe graduate outcomes in subsequent years. This is the fifth report that the CSO has produced using the ELD, and the first to involve a detailed examination of a specific field of study. These reports are examples of the policy-relevant research projects the CSO are developing as part of the CSO’s leadership role of the Irish Statistical System. Our goal is to maximise the variety and volume of data available to provide high quality information to the Government, businesses and citizens.”

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