Mr. Oliver Egan:

We will engage with the Department of Education and Skills following the stakeholders' review conference and report we have published. Allied to that, we have the ongoing development of Intreo and the roll-out of case officer positions. A great deal of work is taking place and momentum is building and by the end of the year we will be considerably further down the road to the roll-out of Intreo offices. It will be completed next year. The case officer positions will be reassigned and people will be retrained. There is a desire to improve the services set out within Pathways to Work, the Intreo process and so on. We are anxious in looking at these programmes that they are effective and fair. We are conscious in developing policy that in so far as possible case officers must be clear on why they are making recommendations in particular cases and not in other cases. Perhaps one of the issues that might arise is that we will support certain programmes or third level degrees and not others because it might be considered that they are more appropriate to the labour market. That is also debatable. Is that the appropriate thing to do? Is there a benefit in all education? We have to be careful how we do this.

I take on board the point about the need to make services better for the individual. That is what we are trying to do in our reviews. We are concerned about the issues of exceptions because, as one of my colleagues says, exceptions sometimes become the norm and we want to have clear reasons for making them.

We are in the midst of change and further change is planned. We must carefully work on the parameters of this.