Ms Trish O'Brien:

Mr. Vaughan mentioned that Congress strongly supports lifelong learning. I agree absolutely. We would never imply that the community and voluntary sector was not interested in quality. If anything I, or we, have said gave that impression, that would be very unfortunate because we would never wish to imply that.

Ours is a quality assurance body dealing with the whole education and training system, and the resourcing of a sub-sector within that cannot influence the quality assurance standards we were legislatively set up to deal with. We are not suggesting that all of these providers should go to an ETB as an easy answer. That may be the route, and the further education and training, FET, strategy may be able to help with that. We are trying to propose the idea of networks constructively and positively. We have to work through what we mean by that with ICTU and Aontas. There is a difference between getting together to share practice, talk to one another and avoid isolation, and possibly reducing the number of primary providers who deal directly with QQI and potentially having others linked to that primary provider. It is not just a question of paying fees to QQI; running quality assurance systems internally for any provider costs a great deal of money. Diverting more of that into the provision and dealing with quality assurance through fewer units might be a way to go. We would have to work through that and see if that kind of model would ensure that the quality assurance standards are being met in the interests of learners and providers.