Mr. Tom Boland:

At the risk of being prosaic, it must be money or not exactly money but how we sustainably support the higher education system we need in terms of the skills of the economy, leaving aside personal and social development. There is no short answer to this question, but this is where I hope the funding group will serve its purpose. It is not necessarily just a question of taking the figures for the number of students and saying resource per student multiplied by the number of students equals X amount of extra money needed. It is also to do with how we regulate the higher education institutions, the kinds of freedoms we give to the sector and the kind of accountability we hold the institutions to. In the university sector in particular, but increasingly in the institutes of technology, they have considerable capacity to raise funding themselves and they do that. That capacity could be increased. We need to look in an innovative and in the round way at the issue of a sustainably supported higher education system and the appropriate funding arrangements. This is the obvious issue, but not an easy one.