Dr. Frances O'Connell:

I thank the Deputy for his comment. We are highly committed to our students. The Cathaoirleach visited us in TUS, for which I thank him. In summary, we are trying to do more and more with less. We identified the complexity of students' needs in our written submission. We thank the Minister for the attention he has given since he became Minister but we have a difficulty with the multiplicity of project funding so my summary always is that we need to normalise what is that exceptional funding whereby, rather than having exceptional funding from one to ten, we understand the need we have for funding as we have outlined. Moreover, we need to know that this funding will continue because if Frances O'Connell walks into TUS as an autistic student on day one in September, she has every right to expect that she will be supported but that need is complex. One of the advantages for us in the technological universities involves smaller class sizes. We do know our students and as well as the numbers who are registered, we have become aware of other students who do not register through the DARE scheme or do not register initially as autistic but because of the nature of our academic community and student support services, we become aware of them. We want them to have the same positive student experience as every student in our university and to succeed academically but this demands a wraparound of service provision from day one until the students' final day when we watch them graduate. This is our obligation in terms of public service and that is what we want to be able to do. The teams do everything in terms of trying to work with the rules of the funding to see what we can do exceptionally to support students. As for the overall level of funding and with the increase of the numbers, I noted 87% - even within the number of years - in terms of autistic students registering. There is a causal effect here. More students will register as being autistic yet our funding model is going down. We do not want to be in that scenario. We want to strategically plan for the service provision but I can only do so for autistic students if I know we will have the funding.