Professor Dervil Jordan:

As Professor Glennie said, we are a very small college in the heart of Dublin and we are capable of responding to local needs. We have built relationships and established partnerships within the local community, with 35 DEIS primary schools and 42 DEIS secondary schools. We also have a range of outreach programmes in the greater Dublin area and County Dublin. Our focus is on bringing students into the campus.

This remains a key priority in terms of the access days we provide, our student shadowing programmes where the students spend time working along NCAD students, and our mentoring programme through which our student teachers mentor access students interested in a career in art and design. We also provide portfolio scholarship programmes over the summer and during the year for students from disadvantaged areas. We recognise the critical role played by teachers in raising academic aspirations for disadvantaged students and we have a whole range of pre-entry programmes of engagement with primary and post primary schools. We have a supplementary admissions route. We have post-entry support and, more recently, we provide a postgraduate studio support residency programme for our graduated access students.

In terms of the barriers to higher education in art and design, admission policies generally in Irish colleges are very competitive and selective, and entrance to art college can represent a double disadvantage for students with little cultural capital and little knowledge of the field. Increasingly, many middle-class families avail of private tuition for their children such as grinds or portfolio courses, summer schools and trips abroad to galleries and museums, to gain some advantage in this competitive educational terrain. For our access students the prospect of getting into an art college can be very complex. The portfolio alone is a huge challenge with somewhat vague career prospects for those people in the art and design industry, particularly if they choose to do fine art, which is a pretty precarious profession. Our access students, who come from a non-traditional route, may look different when they come to college. They may feel different, act differently or dress differently. It is very important for us to be able to make our access students, with whom we have made contact through the schools, feel that NCAD is their home and that they can come back and consider a career in this field.

In terms of a cross-institutional collaborative approach, I am sure many committee members are aware of the HEA funded programme for access to higher education, PATH. It is aimed at widening participation throughout third level for those most disadvantaged and minority groups in our society. NCAD is working alongside Trinity College Dublin, UCD, Marino Institute of Education and Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in a three-pronged approach to widening participation. Path one is based on initial teacher education and trying to increase the number of learners from this particular area who go into the further education sector. Path two involves the 1916 bursaries. I am not sure whether the committee is aware of them, but this year 80 bursaries were given out to students from disadvantaged backgrounds across the five colleges. Path three is bridges to learning, which deals with more in-depth for work packages under the umbrella of Dublin as a learning city. This includes open learning modules in the universities and mentoring students from minority groups in the third level sector. NCAD is particularly involved in leading the creative arts summer school, which starts next week, across the five campuses. This is rolling out now and we are looking forward to a very co-ordinated approach across the sectors.

The community engagements in which we are involved are very much a range of local partnerships in the arts and beyond. I will not go into huge detail, but these include IMMA with which we have a very strong relationship because we are on a cultural corridor in Thomas Street, luckily, and the national galleries and museums and Collins Barracks are all very close to us in the heart of the city. We have a strong relationship with IMMA in terms of our school's visual culture, fine art and education. We have future creators, which is an after-school digital learning programme for young people co-funded with Digital Hub. Rialto youth project involves Easter and summer art programmes in NCAD in collaboration with our cultural institutions. We also have student placements. mentoring and campus engagement with smaller groups such as SOLAS and Tallaght Community Arts. NCAD runs an entrepreneurship summer camp with Axis Ballymun and the Rediscovery Centre in Ballymun. This is a snapshot for the committee of some of the work NCAD does in our access programme.