Mr. Tim Conlon:

I will offer a broad answer. My colleagues' responses will probably be more specialised. We can always do more with more. We have significant resources coming into higher education and further education. The system is being asked to do more for non-traditional entrants. These could be students with specific learning needs, for example, who need supports. That has to be resourced in some way. When the resource coming in is finite, it needs to be stretched and you have to stop doing one thing to do something else. As both a State and a nation, we have to decide what we want. Do we want a highly skilled population? Do we want to provide that to people in all regions? There is a cost to providing it in geographically dispersed locations and it is very complex.

We do very well and we get excellent outcomes from the investment we make in our education system. We can see that in the statistics. The higher a person's level of educational attainment, the more likely they are to be in a job and stay in a job through an economic cycle and so on. We have all the evidence for that. We can see that the more people are educated, the better their life outcomes are with regard to income and employment, but also health outcomes and all those other things. If people are locked out of that and cannot get into further and higher education, they will not have that opportunity in their lives. They will not have those better health outcomes. There is a deep issue we have to think about there regarding equality.

Providing that access will require resourcing for the individual because people could have caring responsibilities or part-time jobs, and they need to keep the car on the road for driving to college. Hopefully, we can do more about distance learning and it will save them money in that regard. All of those complex things need to be considered and those pieces do not necessarily work well together. Our system serves us very well. It serves a very broad range of students from all kinds of backgrounds, but we are going to have to do more from an equality perspective because the nature of our economy is more high skills based. The Deputy mentioned retrofitting and the green agenda. There are challenges with regard to the sustainable development goals. There is a lot of work to be done and we need to empower the system to respond to that. I used the word "empower" not "fund", but it probably does mean funding. That is what we have to think about.