Mr. Brian Power:

My understanding is that there is one High Court case. I am not clear what the final outcome of this case has been, but we can find that out for the committee afterwards. We are only aware of one case.

We now move to the student assistance fund, SAF. There is an overall fund for third level access of €16.2 million. That is broken down by the HEA. It covers two funds: the student assistance fund, which is a discretionary fund run by individual colleges, generally through the access office of the college; and the fund for students with disabilities, which provides extra support via the HEA through colleges. That funding is made available to colleges through the HEA. The HEA has a finance committee that examines it and examines the level of demand for the SAF and the fund for students with disabilities each year. It splits that fund every year on the basis of the likely demand for each of those schemes. There is always room for extra funding, if available, and there is always a high demand on this. Interestingly, the HEA carried out a brief survey for us just before Christmas to see where demand was and it found that something in the region of 44%, almost half, of colleges felt there was a significant draw on the fund and they needed extra funding. Some 48% had enough for what had been asked for up to that point. The final 4% of colleges had less demand than they had had in the previous year. That is obviously a very small number of colleges, but otherwise it is half and half in terms of the increase or decrease in demand from the colleges. That is the information that has come back from the HEA. The allocation for the current year overall for the fund is the same and the HEA will look at the relative split in that for the coming academic year, 2015-16.