Professor Karina Pierce:

I thank the Deputy for the questions. On the work placements, all our students go on work placements during third year or stage 3 of their programme and we encourage them to take international placements where possible. Some do not want to do that. It is a great opportunity for them to go. I am director of the dairy business programme. About 90% of our students go on work placement to New Zealand. That is on farm placement. There are a couple of aspects to that. It is not that there are not farmers is good in Ireland, because there absolutely are. That particular cohort of students go in July and that is because the seasons are flipped in New Zealand so they get calving, breeding and so on over there. There is a lot of learning when a student at 19 or 20 years of age heads off with their class. They go as kids and they come back a lot more grown up five or six months later. In terms of broader education there are really important parts to that. We would have students who go to the US, New Zealand, Australia and all over the world but the southern hemisphere would be particularly popular. Part of the reason for that is because they are grass-based countries as well. For dairy in particular, many students will want to go to the Victoria region, southern Australia or, in particular, New Zealand. That is where we would see them. I would speak from the dairy side but our students go everywhere. There has been a lot of pent-up demand from students who felt they could not go anywhere for a couple of years. We have seen a big jump in students who want to study abroad or do a placement abroad because they are thinking they never got anywhere for a couple of years so they want to go while the gate is open.

The Deputy also talked about increasing contact with students doing agricultural science. As we mentioned earlier, we have a lot of contact with agricultural science teachers. Their annual conference is on the UCD Lyons Farm on 18 November. They have had their conferences in Teagasc centres as well. We engage a lot with them. We also engage a lot with career guidance teachers and we would have feeder schools in counties where a lot of students come to UCD from and beyond that. Staff go out to information evenings and talk about the programmes. We try to extend our reach as much as we can. The UCD open day is on Saturday and there will be thousands of students coming to that from all over the country. We very much try to speak with the career guidance teachers, get out to the schools and educate them about new programmes that are coming. Professor Monahan mentioned the sustainable food systems programme. Our job now is marketing that and getting out to the schools, to the agricultural science teachers and so on.