Dr. Nicholas Breakwell:

I am the executive dean of Hibernia College. I will give a brief overview of the college and the programmes it offers, and perhaps say a little about our history and how we arrived at our current position. I will talk members through the document we sent them and pick out some highlights. We were established in 2000 and therefore have been in operation for approximately 12 years. We started our first HETAC-accredited programme in 2002, a master's degree in public administration in partnership with Dublin City Council.

Our first teacher training programme was launched in 2003, which was a primary school initial teacher training programme, accredited by HETAC and, at the time, the Department of Education and Science, and now the Teaching Council of Ireland.

We are based here in Dublin and also have offices in Westport and in London, where we are delivering initial teacher training programmes in collaboration with the British Government. We have approximately 100 full-time staff and 300 to 400 part-time faculty members who do most of the delivery of the programmes, both here and abroad.

Hibernia College was established by Seán Rowland and Sara McDonnell to improve access to higher education for those who find the traditional access routes difficult, both in Ireland and elsewhere. That remains our mission today, namely, to develop and deliver high-quality, fully accredited postgraduate and undergraduate education at an affordable price to those who find it difficult, for family, geographical or other reasons, to access traditional modes of education. In order to do that, we make full use of the benefits of educational technology and we deliver all of our programmes in a blended fashion, where a significant proportion of the student learning experience occurs online, supplemented by face-to-face provision and, in the case of teacher training, by the in-school experience. We provide a range of programmes but our biggest programmes in Ireland are our initial teacher education programmes. We are the largest provider of newly qualified primary school teachers in the country. Approximately 35% to 40% of all newly qualified teachers come through our programme. We have also recently started a new post-primary initial teacher training programme and the first cohort of students will graduate from that programme this summer.

We are also accredited by the Teaching Agency in England, largely as a result of the success and high quality of the programme we offer in Ireland. We were able to persuade the Teaching Agency in England, or the Training and Development Agency, TDA, as it was at the time, to accredit us as an initial teacher training provider in that jurisdiction. We currently have an allocation from the agency to deliver maths, physics, chemistry and modern foreign languages initial teacher training programmes at second level. We are also working with the agency to expand that provision into other secondary subjects and into primary level programmes. We are the largest provider in England of what are known as subject knowledge enhancement programmes, which are fully funded by the British Government for the purposes of upskilling already qualified teachers who need additional skills in, for example, maths or modern foreign languages. We are currently delivering those programmes across England.

In Ireland, we also deliver our programmes across the whole country. Anybody in any county in Ireland can access our provision, and at every single graduation ceremony we have had students from every county in the country. We also offer a range of programmes in the health science arena. Our flagship programme is a master of science in pharmaceutical medicine, which is like an MBA for the pharmaceutical industry. That programme was initiated with Pfizer and now has students from 36 different countries and every major pharmaceutical company participating. As a result of that first programme, we now have a range of other programmes and are in receipt of FP7 funding from the EU for two major projects. The first project deals with this particular area of training and the other is called EUPATI, which is a series of patient advocacy websites across the EU for those suffering from various diseases.

We also offer a series of continuing professional development, CPD, programmes in this country for primary and post-primary teachers in the form of short courses, as well as a full master's degree programme. We have recently launched undergraduate provision in Ireland, in partnership with the University of London. We are a recognised centre of that institution and we also offer programmes under the direction of the London School of Economics and Goldsmith's College in finance, business and computing. Those programmes only started in October and we are hoping to grow that provision in Ireland and globally. We believe there is a fantastic opportunity to assist those very high-quality and world-renowned institutions to deliver their programmes on a global scale.

In terms of the way we develop and deliver our programmes, we have a team of about 35 to 40 individuals who are content development specialists and they work with subject matter experts, under the direction of the course management team, of which Ms Davitt is a member for our primary programme. The content is developed under an academic framework which we call COACT, the aim of which is to enable students to get to a stage of critical thinking about the content on a session-by-session and module-by-module basis. The content itself is delivered in three main formats across the web. The first is on-demand content, which is pre-recorded, lecture-style material which can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across the virtual learning environment. The second is live, online, synchronous tutorials, similar to a WebEx conferencing tool, where students have to log in at a particular time and are facilitated through the tutorial by an online tutor. Those sessions run in the evenings for our provision in Ireland and at other times for our provision around the world. The third main type of content is asynchronous or non-time-dependent collaboration work that students engage in, which would include tools such as forums, blogs, Wikis, learning diaries and so forth, and all of our course content would involve tasks which require students to engage with that type of work.

We have built our reputation on the indigenous quality of our product and the HETAC accreditation, which assures that quality. We have also built it by partnering with a number of prestigious universities around the world and offering programmes in collaboration with them. Some of those universities are mentioned in the document circulated to the committee prior to this meeting and include the University of London, MIT, with which we are involved in research on blended learning, Peking University, which is China's top university, the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, with which we deliver an MSc in regulatory sciences in sub-Saharan Africa, the University of Plymouth, which provides accreditation services for our teacher training provision in England, and a number of others. I have already mentioned that three key quality checks for us are our academic accreditation provided by HETAC, now the QQI, and, in terms of our teacher training programmes, the two teacher training professional accreditations from the Teaching Council in Ireland and the Teaching Agency in England.

That is all I will say for now, by way of introduction but would welcome any questions from members of the committee.