Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 24 May 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills

Future Funding of Higher Education: Discussion (Resumed)

Photo of Simon HarrisSimon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator. On the cost of living, there are measures the Government needs to look at specifically for students and their families. A number of the measures we have taken as a Government benefit students. In fairness to the Senator's party leader, the Minister, Deputy Ryan, one of the most impactful has been the change brought about in public transport costs. They have reduced for everybody but overwhelmingly reduced for people under the age of 24, many of whom are students, by up to 50%. That is an example of a whole-of-population measure with a specific targeted element that will benefit students above and beyond the rest of the population. We need to look at clever ways to do more things like that. The electricity credit will benefit students in student accommodation as well.

There will be a budget in October and we want to do much more on student supports, but from September we will see immediate improvements for students. They include the €1,000 extra a home can earn and still qualify for a SUSI grant, the first income threshold increase in a decade. The grant will go up by €200 for all students. That is the first time in a decade. That does not tell the full story because we have changed the adjacency rates. One had to live 45 km or more from college to get the higher grant. That goes down to 30 km from September, meaning many students will see their grant increase by more than 25%. That is thousands of euro of an increase.

We are eager to do more. As I said to Deputy Conway-Walsh, we are eager to see, in terms of the timing of that, what more can be done in the coming academic year as well. We will work through that in the Estimates process.

One group of students that I would like to see prioritised in the SUSI is postgraduate students. The cost of doing postgraduate education in Ireland is particularly high. We made improvements to the level of support through Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, in our first budget as a Government. There is a shared view across Government that we would like to do more in that space as well.

On the accelerated programmes, I agree fully with Senator Pauline O'Reilly. I do not mean the following in relation to the Senator. We all, including me, use the term apprenticeship sometimes as a catch-all phrase for upskilling and reskilling. What I saw yesterday when I opened a new retrofitting training centre in Limerick was that there are many accelerated programmes where somebody can access a piece of training, that might only take three or four days, to get the green skills that he or she needs to retrofit somebody's home. For an unemployed person with no construction background, a month in a retrofitting training centre can get him or her probably back into a decent well-paid job with lots of work to come. I am eager that we broaden the apprenticeships, and we are doing so. We have 65 now and 17 more in the pipeline. I am also eager that we look, as the Senator says, at traineeships and shorter courses as well.

On capital, I will make a couple of points. The sector has been starved of capital for a long time. That changes now. We have €450 million to spend between now and 2024, which is a big increase. Forty-five per cent of that will be spent on further education and apprenticeships. As we speak, SOLAS, is assessing applications with others and we expect this summer to be able to start announcing projects in the technological universities. In addition, we have also through the European Research Development Fund ring-fenced funding of €80 million specifically for research in the technological universities, TUs. Only the TUs will be able to apply, which should benefit them.

Apologies, I ran over time.

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