Mr. Jim Miley:

I thank the Senator and echo her view on the SUSI grants. We wholeheartedly support that. There has been an increase in the recent budget but it is critical that it is a key component of any future package as we go forward. On skills and the revolution, as the Senator rightly calls it, we are conscious of the need to adapt the system of third level education. The traditional undergraduate and postgraduate degrees will remain key pillars of our system into the future. However, we need to supplement them substantially with a suite of flexible learning programmes. One of those, which has been funded under the human capital initiative, is the micro-credentials programme we are running. It is a four-year programme where we are getting all of our universities to develop a suite of small-scale but fully university accredited programmes. Already, a number of our universities have those in the market. We are trying to pull them together on a common platform with common standards, accredited by QQI, as the national accreditation body, so that a person who has an IT degree but wants to do a top-up in business law or vice versa, or any other combination, can do it easily and can get access to those accredited programmes in a very flexible way. The next step would be to stack those so effectively an individual would have the opportunity to stack credits from different universities into a composite qualification.

That is a key priority project for us. The work is already under way. We hope it will be formally launched later this year or early next year on that common platform. That is just the start. We need to drive it forward. As we go forward, the notion of coming out of college with a degree and that doing people for life is dead. Everyone will need top-up qualifications and we think our institutions are best placed to provide them.