Mr. Ned Costello:

I am conscious that I did not address Senator Clune's issues about languages. There has been an extensive effort to increase participation in Erasmus on the part of the institutions, IBEC and the HEA. Encouragingly there was an 18% growth in students participating in Erasmus between 2009-10 and 2010-11. This was an increase of nearly 400 students to more than 2,500. They travelled to 30 of the 32 participating Erasmus countries and approximately 20% of them undertook a work placement as part of their Erasmus periods abroad.

The Senator also asked about a more integrated approach to policy on languages, which we would welcome. Just as with the work we have been doing on selection and entry to university, the better we can join up all parts of the education system pipeline, the better it will be. The work the HEA will do on giving us a better picture of exactly what is going on across the sector as a whole will be very helpful. Clearly the whole geopolitics of where our markets are is changing. However, we do not see that reflected in the education system as a whole, particularly from second level into third level, which is a major structural issue and is something that we agree needs to be considered.