Dr. Anne-Marie Butler:

To add briefly to the points Professor O’Mara raised, this year, we took an initiative to try to reach out to secondary students with a live webinar from our studio in Oak Park, which is a new development where we communicated to secondary schools across the country. In excess of 140 schools dialled in live. The objective of the session was to show the courses and facilities within Teagasc education, which will create an awareness of agriculture, horticulture, equine and forestry. It was interesting to hear back from the career guidance teachers. They acknowledged this was an area we could co-operate together more in. We are now trying to get out more to the schools. Part of that is the area of knowledge transfer and even just bringing to people’s attention where our food comes from and all that is involved in the process.

It is interesting that in our distance education students in the past number of years, there is an increasing cohort of students in those groups who are not farming on a day-to-day basis. They are working off-farm but they are feeding back to us on curriculum content, biodiversity and areas we can get stronger on with respect to content for their needs and the wider spread of knowledge transfer and where education is.

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine kindly funded simulators and that has been a welcome development for us. There are agriculture simulators and soon to be cow and calf and injecting simulators. Those are very powerful in a non-ag setting. Our college in Clonakilty welcomed busloads of primary school children over the past year or two. It was interesting and rewarding, and the students asked great questions. Perhaps we often assume that if people are in the heart of west Cork, they have an appreciation. However, the questions showed us that we need to reach out further, and those simulators are powerful for that. We have the ploughing match and other events to reach the non-ag or non-farming background audience also.

Finally, I take the Senator’s point on looking at the part-time and distance options and that under-23 age restriction. That was raised with us even in the past couple of days. Certainly, we will take that away and we are happy to engage as we review that and understand where we can make that more accessible for people.