Professor Sarah Glennie:

The National College of Art and Design, NCAD, is Ireland's leading art and design college. We offer the largest number of art and design degrees in the State at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Located in the heart of the Liberties in Dublin 8, the NCAD is a small college with just over 1,200 students and 600 part-time evening students. The benefit of this is that we are flexible and capable of responding to local needs.

The impact of the NCAD is felt far beyond the campus on Thomas Street. Our graduates are innovators, co-creators and self-starters and are evident in all aspects of the economy from public engagement through working in public institutions, to technology and industry. We have a long history of connecting our students and programmes with partners in education, the cultural sector and civil society. Our contribution to enabling wider participation in the arts is seen in the work of our students as they follow their paths out of college across a range of fields and our school of education trains our country's art teachers. All our students are encouraged, though their education, to think about the role of their practice as they leave college and the ways they can connect their work to either a specific audience or a specific context.

The NCAD has a long and very embedded commitment to access to art college and we will outline the access policy today. We will reflect on some of the complex and deep-rooted social and economic factors that can militate against wider participation in the arts and how, since 2005, we started to tackle under-representation in the NCAD using a participatory and inclusive approach.