Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 16 May 2017

Select Committee on Education and Skills

Estimates for Public Services 2017 (Resumed)
Vote 26 - Education and Skills (Revised)

4:00 pm

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

There are a number of questions there. This year, for the first year in about ten years, we have increased the funding to higher education. We have recognised that a funding deficit had built up over a number of years. There had been virtually no new funding for a decade, along with a declining amount of Exchequer funding which was partly compensated by rising student grants over an extended period. This meant that while student numbers grew, the cost per student came down, and that undoubtedly put a funding squeeze on the colleges. In order to redress that, we have put in place investment this year, and we also have secured from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform a commitment that there will be a demographic element in our funding formula. This means that as colleges expand their student numbers in the coming years, as wholly envisaged by the Cassells's report, we will see an increasing Exchequer contribution, something they lacked throughout that period. On top of that, as I mentioned to Deputy Catherine Martin, we have introduced consultation on a new source of funding, namely, an employer contribution, which was one of the elements recommended by Peter Cassells in his report and by the group he led. Deputy Thomas Byrne referred to idea of an income contingent loan, and I have always acknowledged that there needs to be a political consensus on this issue before we can move forward with it. My Department is doing the prudent thing and is preparing the ground should the Oireachtas decide that this is something we would like to go ahead with. We are putting the necessary framework in place for this idea to be implemented and have thought through what it would take to do so. That is all that has been done. We have not commissioned expensive outside work. What we have is a group looking at how this idea would work in practical terms should the Oireachtas decide to go with it.

Deputy Nolan said that funding is insufficient. What is encouraging is that the recently published performance framework for the third level colleges showed improvements across all of the indicators, including quality indicators and indicators such as their success in extending recruitment to people from disadvantaged backgrounds, people with disabilities and mature students, and their capacity to win additional research funding. There is a whole matrix of performance indicators. This last period, despite being very constrained, showed very significant progress by the third level institutions. Like many parts of the education system, there is no doubt that third level did things above and beyond at a time of crisis, and has had very significant achievements. That, as recognised by everyone, is not an option for the future. We have to plan on the basis of continued expansion and the new challenges ahead. Our third level sector is not perfect in every dimension. It has had some very big successes but there are other areas in need of improvement. That is the context in which we have committed to this investment trajectory, and we want to work with it to achieve more.

On the issue of private colleges and those who enrol in them, this would mark a significant change from the existing programme and would need a significant budgetary provision. At the moment, SUSI grants apply only to approved programmes in approved institutions and, by in large, it follows a very competitive CAO process for gaining access and so on. The private colleges are obviously fee-paying, for-profit colleges, and are a different type of institution. Policy to date has not been to extend the student supports to private colleges. I know the case has been made for this, but there are pros and cons that we would have to evaluate in terms of whether we take the step of going beyond the publicly funded colleges, with their known types of enrolment and attractions, to supporting for-profit colleges, and this would have to be done in a budgetary context. This would be a sales element in their approach. There is a for and against - I am not saying I am coming down on either side - that we would have to weigh up in public policy terms.

In terms of numbers, 80,000 students are supported on these grants and this year we have been able to extend them in a small way to postgraduate grants at the lowest level of income support. However, this scheme has not been reviewed in a number of years and I suppose people will have to decide what is the priority here in terms of what we do with scarce grant funding for grants. Do we look at extending the grant to private colleges or do we look at people who are coming into the system at a huge disadvantage and try to improve their terms of access? There are choices here - I am not trying to prejudge them - that would have to be made in a budgetary context.

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