Professor Diarmuid Hegarty:

To answer Senator Gallagher's question, in our paper we talked about the immediate possibility of providing 7,000 additional places. As regards the funding and how other jurisdictions dealt with this, the British have approached it in a clever way in that they have extended the student loan funding to students of what they call "alternative providers". They have learned the lesson from the United States by limiting the amount of the loan and they will only lend up to Stg£6,000 a year in respect of a course in an alternative provider in the UK. This prevents astronomic student loans building up where students are studying with private providers, as has been the case in the United States. There is a way of learning lessons from elsewhere, and through the student loan system there is definitely a way of funding much greater access through the private colleges.