Professor Sarah Glennie:

NCAD is very committed to our students. All art and design students are challenged through their learning to consider how their creative work will find a place in society and to think about the context for their work with potential audiences and the potential for their work as artists in collaborating with people working in specific contexts and different audiences. We are starting a new initiative in September, studio plus, which is a new voluntary year for students between second year and third year. The programme will encourage them to take their work out of the campus and work in different places in the community around us. An example of this is our collaboration with Mercer's Institute for Successful Ageing in St. James's Hospital. Throughout all of next year we will have students embedded in that unit. The studios will be there and the teaching will take place in that institute. It has an incredible innovative creative life programme and the students will be part of this.

For 25 years NCAD ran a learning programme in Portlaoise Prison, with NCAD staff providing opportunities for creative engagement for people in prison, critically at the same level of those being offered to people in third level education. A lot of participants in that programme then went on to partake in further education in art and design. In the context of today's discussion, we mention this as a past programme because we think it is a really good and clear example of where long-term investment and engagement really do lead to change.

The other learning we wanted to bring to the table from our history of engaging beyond the campus with people in creativity is the value of cross-sectoral collaboration, where we think beyond the silos in which we operate, which are often dictated by funding models more than anything else. Professor Jordan mentioned an example of this. As an educational institute we have collaborated with national cultural institutions such as IMMA.

We welcome the commitment of the committee to broadening participation in the arts, and we recommend that Government initiatives to support this are reflective of the ongoing work happening in a range of organisations in the educational sector and in cultural institutions, and that there is a commitment at policy level to longitudinal research in arts participation, something that has never really happened at a significant level in Ireland. This would provide us with real evidential data of the impact of the creative arts for all of us to build informed strategies so we can really think about how, through creative art, we can meet the needs of our changing society in future.