Ms Carol Hanney:

The Senator mentioned young people. Young people are afraid. They are not all out partying. They are afraid and we see that in our schools and colleges.

Regarding people with disabilities, we try very hard to give people with disabilities the same opportunities as everyone else. We are funded to help people who have disabilities, who use sign language, etc. During Covid, some people with disabilities were affected more than others, depending on what their disabilities were. It was probably not as serious for those with physical disabilities, as long as they were not sight-related or something. They had different experiences but in all our colleges and centres we would have kept up very close contact by phone and so on with them.

The Senator asked about young people using their phones. They are used to using their phones but we discovered that they did not know how to do a lot of things on their phones and we had to teach them that as well. There is a digital divide in society for young people and also older people, particularly for our community in adult education. Older people suffer very much in that area as well because they do not use IT at work. We are dealing with those people as well. I mentioned already that we distributed IT devices to people but it is a real concern.

As regards delivering courses online, we moved everything online immediately. We moved anything that could be moved online there and even for some of the practical areas we did them through videos, Zoom, Teams, etc. We are working on developing blended learning. We have some courses already but we also have to work with QQI to get validation for the awards and to have the programmes accepted.