Dr. Nicholas Breakwell:

I will first address some of the questions about the nature of e-learning perhaps with an anecdote. Massive open online courses or MOOCs are a phenomenon sweeping through higher education currently. The first was a course in artificial intelligence run by Stanford University. More than 100,000 first registered for the programme while significantly fewer finished it. The course was run concurrently on site at the university as well. Several thousand students finished the programme and of the top 100 performers in the examination, only one was in the on-site programme. Increasingly, the question is not how online learning can be as good as traditional face to face learning but how can face to face learning up its game to become as good as online learning. That is what we would say to anybody who has any doubts or who is seeking comfort in the value and the quality of online provision - not just our provision but high quality online provision anywhere else in the globe.

With regard to comparisons of our initial teacher training provision in Ireland with other providers of such training - we are talking here about the postgraduate programme - as far as costs go, we have benchmarked our fees against those charged by other providers but they also receive, in addition to the fee paid by the student, a considerable and variable amount from the Exchequer to supplement that ranging from €8,000 in the case of the large colleges such as St. Patrick's college and Marino college to €40,000 in the smaller colleges which only train a small number of students. As far as the students go, they pay almost the same at plus or minus 5%.

We cost the Exchequer zero euro; all the other providers together cost €25 million a year. When comparing quality of courses, all our programmes are now validated by the Teaching Council of Ireland against its set of standards for measuring ITE providers. We meet those standards in the same way as any other provider of ITE. Beyond that, there is no formal objective measure of quality, no inspection system in this country which can tell us anything more than that. The Department of Education and Skills inspects the quality of newly-qualified teachers but, unfortunately, that information is not made public. Therefore, while we have our own views about where we rate - which is quite near the top of that quality measure - that information is not known because it is not subject to public scrutiny.

In England our provision is subject to Ofsted inspection. We are still a new provider in England so we have not as yet been subject to a first Ofsted inspection. We have engaged an external Ofsted consultant to carry out a pre-check. We believe our provision will achieve the highest grade of "Outstanding". That provision is based on what we do in Ireland so that grade will be an indirect score for the quality of our work in Ireland. On the assumption that the grade will be high, we are happy to share that assumption with the committee. The model of provision which is 50% online and 50% face-to-face, is exactly the same and is based on our experience in Ireland.