Aisling Dolan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is crucial. Ms Murphy spoke about the mentorship being crucial, and we have spoken about this before along with Dr. Morning and Mr. Smyth. It is crucial that we get those additional supports. I am aware that more than €500,000 has gone to Trinity College in terms of mental health supports in the past two years. This has been to recruit additional counsellors and to support those students. I would love to see that this year. The CAO form has been expanded to include apprenticeship programmes and further and higher education. With regard to the levels of drop out across all of third level, if we are to use these other resources and supports through further and higher education where we are pumping in a lot of investment into our technological universities as well, we must ask if the level of dropout changes at the end of first year. Again, my apologies. We might get time at the end to come back to this.