Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

On the Minister's point regarding the need to sharpen the weighting for funding in terms of access and so on, I believe we first need to overhaul access from second level to third level in terms of how the Department divides up the colleges versus the schools. Currently, the colleges have no say in this regard, as the links were set years ago by the Department and have never been reviewed. For example, the link college for Killinarden Community School is UCD. For a child who comes from an educationally disadvantaged background in Tallaght, UCD is very far away. There is a need for a review of the linkage between schools and colleges with a view to changing them up a little. The two best performing schools in Tallaght are linked with the Trinity access programme, TAP. This means that we are missing the boat in terms of access by most of the disadvantaged schools within disadvantaged areas.