James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. Indeed, it has been a couple of long days and there are probably many more to come, but if we join the army, we have to soldier. That is part of the job of being a Minister. I was on site in other colleges this morning before I came here as well, so I have been on the road already. There will many more days like it.

On student fees, the options paper, which I intend to publish later this summer, will set out all the conceivable options that are being suggested, that are in the public debate and that the Department and I have considered. I am also open to submissions as to other options that should form part of that. It will set out the costings for different options right across SUSI, grants, fees and thresholds, and set out a framework of parameters and a good number of costed tables that people can then use to guide the discussions and to inform the debate better as we come into the budget. All options will be on the table in terms of costings. I am very open-minded and keen to support students to the maximum extent. My only limit is what resources are made available to me by the Minister for Finance and the Minister for public expenditure in the budget. Within the parameters that I have, I will maximise the outcome for students. All conceivable options will be costed up and put out as part of that.

Regarding the eligibility of more colleges to the SUSI scheme, this is something I am aware of and I have had some conversations on. Going back to my other point, for every one thing that we do, there is something we cannot do. We cannot cut the student contribution fee and widen the SUSI net to many other new colleges at the same time possibly. We can have that discussion but we cannot do everything, and certainly not in the first budget of the first year. There are things we can do and cannot do. There is a prioritisation around those with regard to which we might do first and, when we get things progressed, what we might do at a later stage. In fairness, the Deputy acknowledged that is something that might be for the long haul, and I get that.

The point about the learning coming close to the learner is key. I visited Blanchardstown recently. I opened a new building for another one of our capital projects that we have invested in. That campus is a great success, and it is close to learners in that area. One of the success stories of this Department has been the tertiary education programmes, whereby a student commences training in their local ETB or further education centre. It usually is not a traditional university environment but it is familiar, it is closer to home, it allows them to combine other commitments, such as caring, family duties, part-time work or whatever else they have going on in their lives, and it is maybe less intimidating for some students than stepping through the gates of a large, established college for the first time. They then progress through a course for one or two years. They have a qualification that they can bank at the end of it. Should they wish, and many of them do make this leap, they can progress to a university, be that a TU or traditional university, for the third and subsequent years, leading to a level 8 or higher qualification. I was in Blanchardstown and I met some learners, and I have met some learners at Grangegorman from around the country, who had done that. Some of them told me that they had never seen themselves in a university environment. It was just not within their sphere of experience or their family’s history. Being able to take that first step in a further education environment close to home gave them to confidence to build, grow and then move on. It is a successful course. It goes back to something that I have believed in for a long time, which is that we should not be stereotyped or boxed in from an early stage. We should not say, “Well you have been signed up for this on the CAO at year 1 at 17 years of age, and that is you forever”. We should have more options and pathways through education, lifelong learning, upskilling and reskilling, as well as the ability to do building blocks. We have things like micro-credentials, where you can take a course, sometimes online and sometimes physically, and you can then build them together. Over time, those blocks accumulate into a qualification. You might take a number of them, and then you stack them. They are stackable courses. All of that is about giving flexibility to the learner to learn on their own time, in their own environment and in a way that works for them. That can then be combined and added to at later stages so that they go up the qualifications tree, enhancing their career prospects and their own economic journey and social journey from that. The Deputy is spot on. That is exactly the way I see this system continue to develop, and there is much good work done on that already.

Is there anything else?