Mr. Tim Conlon:

The HEA is in constant conversation with our parent Department about resources. Perhaps we can provide the committee with some information about the background to that. On the general point, yes we are reasonably sufficiently resourced but as we expand into new areas of endeavour there is a requirement for increasing specialisation and specialist resources, for example with data analytics. We have a very capable statistics section. Building that out and increasing resources is one of the challenges. We will come back to the Senator separately on that off-line.

The Senator asked about the technological universities and the expanding research performance. We are seeing a rapid increase in the outputs and the staff profile of the former institutes of technology, now the technological universities. There are more people with PhDs, for example, and by virtue of having more staff with PhDs they want to use that PhD because otherwise why would they have one. This is in the context of supervising students and progressing their disciplines, engaging with enterprise in their regions and so on. The supporting infrastructure for that has been a bit slow to catch up. We have been lucky that we have an allocation from the Government and from the Department in the technological university transformation fund, which is starting to put in place some of those scaffolding and resources around and about this research endeavour. They are challenged, as we all are, to build that in and to put it in place. As the Senator has said, there is vast detail in the applications about the strategies for research, what they want to do at what their ambition is. They need to be supported to achieve this ambition.