Ms Marian Duggan:

I appreciate the opportunity to partake in this round-table discussion on the future funding of higher education.

Ireland has recorded significant progress in higher education, with much of the architecture in place. We now need consistent and focused public investment to ensure higher education in Ireland delivers on our national ambition and international obligations. Substantial investment in the creation of technological universities has taken place. However, this has mostly taken the form of one-off investment, designed to assist the development process, or competitive-based funding, which is not guaranteed on a multi-annual basis and does not allow the institutions to "plan forward" in spending. Consequently, not only is there a need for significant multi-annual, long-term investment in higher education generally, there is also a further specific need for the same in technological universities. Failure to make that investment will inevitably affect the ability of the sector to satisfy the ambitions laid out for it by Government and will hinder the capacity to contribute to the pipeline of skills talent that the country requires.

With the increase in student numbers, student support services have faced increasing demands and particularly in our institutions, where such services suffer from legacy funding inequalities. Given their profile, our students have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Existing inequalities in housing, income and cultural capital have been amplified. Students have sought to maintain their learning while dealing with challenges relating to mental health and well-being, poor quality study spaces off-campus and extended periods of isolation that undermined the traditional whole student experience.

While technological universities acknowledge and welcome the additional "one-off" funding initiatives provided during this time, it is critical that we move to multi-annual funding to enable strategic planning and decision-making, with efficient reporting processes so that these essential services are enabled to devote their time to the support of individuals. Technological universities urgently require specific investment to embed fully the consent framework and achieve the required cultural changes at the heart of the framework. This investment would benefit both students and staff.

The transformation to technological universities is the biggest educational change of our times. For technological university employees, that will mean transformation and change also. We are awaiting the final report from the OECD advising on the academic contract and related matters. The introduction of professor grades, a workload allocation model to reflect the changing nature of an academic's work, including research and administration, as well as the traditional teaching and learning role, robust promotion structures and new senior management structures will have to form part of that report. These changes will require significant increased core funding for the sector, which will require a swift response from Government.

A further challenge relates to the lessons from Covid-19. Students appreciated the ability to learn online and there is no doubt that blended and online delivery will feature more regularly in the years to come. We will need to invest in training and development over the next few years to leverage this potential. To address this, the recent submission by the technological sector for funding under the national recovery and resilience plan focuses on investment in state-of-the-art digital infrastructure.

With respect to capital investment, there is a concentration now on inflation and the costs of living. For our students, the student accommodation challenge looms large. The increase in student numbers, including international students, is creating an unprecedented demand for suitable, affordable student accommodation that has been exacerbated by the wider societal housing need. There is no doubt that increasing the supply of on-campus purpose-built student accommodation could relieve the pressure on the private rented market. The delays in addressing this matter over the past few years cannot continue. Technological universities await access to the borrowing framework.

The lack of capital buildings investment is of great concern and the public private partnership process currently under way is slow and not delivering the building stock required in the immediate future. A major capital fund must be allocated and disbursed. This capital deficit extends beyond the physical buildings into equipment, facilities and information technology infrastructure, including for research and innovation.

With regard to research and innovation, part of the development of technological universities is the policy imperative and legislative requirements to grow our research and innovation capacity in support of the regions and, in particular, in support of enterprise. The main challenge is that core funding is insufficient, so any research and innovation capacity-building funding, while very welcome, is time-limited and being used to fund initiatives that would more sustainably be funded from core. This presents a particular challenge to establishing the well-resourced research and innovation support offices typical of a university sector.

There have been repeated calls for the research and innovation allocation through the recurrent grant to increase from €5 million per year, which has been a static amount since its introduction in 2019, to 5% of the overall sector recurrent grant over a period of five years, eventually increasing to 10% of total recurrent grant, as is the case in the traditional universities.

Our students are from many and varied backgrounds and they reflect the increasing diversity of our complex society. The funding model has been revised but it does not adequately address the diversity of needs in our system. There is insufficient weighting for student access and no weighting for the smaller student groups that our pedagogical model uses to help such students. Technological universities cannot simply be funded on the same basis as traditional universities with their well-established pipelines of philanthropy and alumni support. At a time, therefore, when higher education is under major financial pressure while trying to maintain academic standards, the pressure on technological universities is even greater. If they are not helped in their earlier stages of development, the opportunity may pass to deliver on balanced economic and regional development and access to education for all.