Dr. Anne Looney:

Yes. I suspect when it comes to the magic question asked by Senator Gallagher about the two key solutions we would choose, the answer would cost money, so I will leave that side to my colleague. Some of Senator Ruane's points, particularly about the way classes are organised, might be better addressed by colleagues from the management body. I would say to the Senator that I mentioned in an observation I was making that we are trying to widen the population of people coming into teaching and that we are proud of our partnership. We have two hubs on Dublin's north side where we are working with young people and older people to enable them to come into teaching. We have experienced some success, and we will be welcoming them in September. That is broadening the base of people coming into teaching. That is important in ensuring we get a more diverse teaching population, not just high quality but also from a wider range of families. Some of those are coming from non-traditional backgrounds and are the children of immigrants. That will be an important development within the teaching profession and we in DCU are very proud of that. Other institutions are doing that as well.

On the issue of data and the numbers, I would remind the committee that the PME used to be called the HDip, which took one year to complete. In 2012, a decision was made to lengthen the period of teacher education in Ireland. I mentioned some of the reasons for that but additional resources were not provided to the higher educational institutions, which meant that most of them reduced their numbers of students by half because they had to keep the students twice as long.

This resulted in a reduction in the number of students and applications, but those numbers have steadily returned. Last year, DCU experienced a 10% increase in its post-primary PME places. We are up 25% this year on last year for those places. This year, on Central Applications Office first choices, education as an undergraduate choice is up just short of 10% overall. Therefore, the idea-----