Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Cairns for her questions. I will take them in sequence.

The issue of people leaving before completion or dropping out of education is key. I am being very blunt about this. It is flattering the targets and our reporting against them. We are, objectively, making progress on progress on access, albeit that the figures are not as high as they need to be. However, we are not measuring what happens after access. The new national access plan will go to Cabinet this month and be published in August or September. It will try to start measuring and determining what happens beyond access. The Deputy is correct. It is a genuine concern we in the sector have.

The Deputy correctly stated that people with disabilities can sometimes say they do not feel like they belong in higher education. We all have to challenge ourselves as to why that is the case. I do not think there is one answer to this, as the Deputy alluded to, in terms of the cultural and systemic change that needs to happen. There are two things that could make a very real difference. The transition planning piece is an obvious way in which we can begin to make a difference, and I have commenced conversation with the Department of Education in that regard. It has done some work and in the interests of brevity I will give the Deputy a note on it. It has a comprehensive employment strategy and is beginning to work with a number of schools on the transition from secondary school into the workforce or third level. It is outlining how it will select schools. The Deputy may have already received a briefing on this from the Department of Education, but I will share the note with her.

When a lot of students get to university, they then feel they do not belong because, to use my words, which I hope are appropriate, they can feel completely overwhelmed in what can be very large institutions. I hope the funding we have put in place around universal design will make a difference.

On what we are going to do about the cost of disability, the normal caveats around budgetary processes and Estimate, which I will not pre-empt, apply. There are two significant ways in which we can help. One is the fund for students with disabilities, which I understand has an annual allocation of about €9.6 million. We will obviously need to stress test that in advance of the budget. The second is the student assistance fund, which is not exclusively for students with disabilities, but many students with disabilities draw from it. There is currently €18.5 million in that fund. I will examine a range of areas to determine how we can assist further.

The question on part time is fair. There is an ambition, but the Deputy has asked when we will deal with it. I take the point. We are moving quite quickly on it. The report was published in May and it is on the website of my Department. About two or three weeks ago, I co-chaired a group with Professors Tom Collins and Anne Looney - the funding our future group. At that meeting, we asked them to prioritise that work. I hope to be in a position to get an outcome from that later this year and then move forward. Unfortunately, I cannot tell the Deputy whether it will happen in 2022 or 2023, but I hope to move quite quickly on it. It is low hanging fruit that could make a real difference. The work is being accelerated and I will come back to the Deputy as soon as I have a definitive timeline.

On the issue of places, third level is different from the school system. We are looking, through universal design, to accommodate and include everybody within the third level sector, rather than the situation around ASD classes and so on which the Deputy correctly referenced. We have funding of about €20 million for the sector for demographics. That is how we will address that.

The issue of staffing is a more interesting question. We had a very good conversation at the funding our future group recently. USI was very good on this. We have set an ambition to reduce the student to staff ratio in higher education to bring it into line with European norms. What we mean when we talk about staff and what came out of that discussion was an agreement that that cannot just be academic staff, but also has to include staff working in a variety of areas including disability, mental health and student support staff and defining these groups so that we can see how many are going at each institution. Again, I cannot pre-empt the budgetary process but my major priority for core funding is to inject more staff to improve ratios. We are not just going to examine academic staff; we will also examine student support staff which will very much include students with disabilities.

I have apprenticeship figures which I am very happy to share with the Deputy. I presume they came from SOLAS and the National Apprenticeship Office. There is quite a bit of detail in that which might be of use to the committee. We are about to establish the equity of access subcommittee of the national apprenticeship alliance. Its job will be to begin to map out the actions we need to take. We have already put in place an additional payment around a gender bursary. I imagine, without pre-empting that work, that is likely to be a further area we can apply in regard to disability. It has been recognised that there are additional costs and challenges, therefore we have provided an additional bursary. I will share the note with the Deputy and the committee.