Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I assure Deputy Thomas Byrne that fulfilment of the commitments in A Confidence and Supply Arrangement for a Fine Gael-Led Government is, of course, a priority. However, it is not a question of doing so in year one. That said, I take the Deputy's point. We are committed to restoring guidance counselling. We are obviously committed to making changes in certain areas - such as the postgraduate area - across the range of agreements.

Having listened to all the contributors, I believe the difficulty is that we nearly spent the full €600 million on education. That is a problem that we have to factor in. Higher education is obviously on the minds of people, as are SNAs and special needs. Both programmes in this regard cost €1.5 billion. The need to increase the numbers is obvious but, looking just at 2017, the share we may get from the allocation of €600 million will not resolve these issues in the long term. It can and will result in important work, I hope, but there is a wider issue as to how we approach the findings of the Cassells report. I obviously accept Deputy Thomas Byrne's point that there are different views on the report. It takes a number of years to roll out a student loan programme. Therefore, having such a programme does not obviate the need to do things in the short term.

There is no doubt that a long-term direction in terms of a funding model would provide confidence around revenue, investment strategies and capacity. As members will be aware, capital investment by the State can in some cases be only a small part of the total capital spend in the higher education area because of its capacity to raise funds and use income flows on which it can depend to ramp up and leverage investment. A framework is important. This is not all about what are we going to do in 2017 to address the crisis in this area. We do need a framework because these institutions plan over a longer period and can leverage other funds if we move in that direction. My goal would be to provide some medium-term certainty in this area. The committee will have a big role to play in that regard.

In regard to Deputy Catherine Martin's question about completions, 16 new schools and 12 large-scale extensions have been completed, which brings the total number of completions to 28. There is an expectation that up to 50 projects will be completed. The Deputy is correct that funding of physical education, PE, halls has been extremely constrained because of the pressure of population growth and that this has restricted the capacity of the available capital to go into other areas. The roll-out of PE to the leaving certificate will take some time to implement. I take the Deputy's point, which brings us back to deciding the priorities of the capital spend. Accommodating pupils' need has had to be the priority. The early payment reflects issues such as immediate needs in terms of repairs, maintenance and so on. There is no doubt but that capital budgets in the third level area are inadequate. In the context of the mid-term review, which is coming up next year, we will be making a strong case for attention in this area. It is not true that there is no budget for junior cycle reform. Some €17 million has been allocated to such reform this year, an increase of €8 million on the previous year. This allocation is not specific to one subhead but is distributed across a number of areas, such as continuous professional development and so on.

I agree with Senator Ruane that access to third level for the disadvantaged is important. My Department recently issued a call inviting participation. It is not true to say that there is no funding for this. The block grant allocation is designed to reward colleges that bring forward access. In other words, built into the third-level block grant allocation is an expectation that the colleges will use the weighting they get to develop programmes that can realise such access. The Department does not design all of the access programmes and tell the colleges to roll them out. The colleges are independent institutions. They develop programmes but in the block grant allocations they are given weightings for certain achievements. I agree with the Senator that we need to sharpen those weightings. We also need to see more opportunities for competitive expectation from the colleges to step up and be innovative and maybe find ways of sharing cost or rewarding results in that area. As the Senator will probably know the Higher Education Authority is reviewing the current model. It is a highly complex which I do not always understand.