Mr. Peter Cassells:

I thank the Chair, Deputies and Senators for the questions. I will respond to them as best I can. I am taking the questions as being the committee's identification of the key issues in terms of advice to us. This is an ongoing process and we need as much advice as possible from people as to what are the priorities. That brings me to the first question from Deputy McConalogue. In terms of the timeline for the final report, it is to be finished by the end of this year. The first phase was on the role and value of education. The second phase which will be around the effectiveness and efficiencies and how the current system operates. We will have a consultation paper towards the end of June and would certainly welcome an opportunity to come back to the committee, as Deputy Brendan Ryan said, to discuss it because it will raise many of the issues that were raised, such as where the reductions have occurred, the balance between lecturing and administration and the balance between teaching and research.

Perhaps I can link that back to the question asked.

Will there be recommendations or options in the final report? Implications for the options can depend on what countries one is examining. We were asked to do it by way of options but as a group we wanted these as implementable options. In a sense, it would have been easy to do this as a technical exercise and tell Oireachtas Members that these are the options they need to implement. However, we need to drill down into each of the options as to their advantages, disadvantages and how they might operate in an Irish context. An option that may be successful abroad may not operate in an Irish context. For example, Ireland’s demographics and growing population have a different implication and set of pressures for funding than in Germany where the population is falling. We need to drill down into all of that for Oireachtas Members so that when they come to make a decision on this, they have all this information. It will be as close to recommendations that one could get without our group declaring them to be recommendations.

A range of reports were done by the HEA, the Irish Universities Association and others over several years on the sustainability of the system and on demographics. Unfortunately, none of those reports pulled the whole thing together. The reason we started with phase 1 on the role, the value and the scale of third level education was to pull all these reports together to say this is the historical evolution of the higher education system, this is what it should be and its values. We had many discussions and arguments with the various groupings on this. We were clear that the value is both for a collective societal good and individual gain. The system has in a sense strayed into individual gain as opposed to society investing in a proper system.

We are now moving into the phase of examining the efficiencies and effectiveness of the system. This ties into the reduction in funding and the increase in student numbers with the impact on teaching quality. This will be dealt with it in some detail in the report. The question of the staff-student ratio, namely the numbers lecturers have to deal with, as well as the capacity for smaller group and one-to-one interaction, is having an impact on teaching quality. As Senator O’Donnell asked, the question that keeps on arising is does one professionalise the teaching aspect. In Australia, they have professionalised teaching with little involvement in research. Some groupings have argued for this with us while others have argued it should be teaching and research. Others argued there should be research-led teaching so that it is up-to-date with the most recent developments in an area. Others argued that those engaged in key research should be exempted from teaching. It is interesting that some of the top research people have said they want to teach because that is their whole raison d’êtrefor being involved.