Professor Emer Smyth:

There is certainly some. Some of the colleges have outreach workers positioned in the South who work with particular local schools. It could be improved by devoting more time to the dissemination of information. However, the MASN cap we have talked about is a real disincentive for colleges in the North. Another disincentive relates to the timing of offers. This was exacerbated in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Conditional offers issue from universities in Northern Ireland and the UK very early, prior to the exams. Exam results come out later and places are offered. A couple of stakeholders in the North said they were keeping places open for southern candidates who had provisionally accepted them but that those candidates did not take them up and that it was then too late to fill them. Timing is an issue and it is a more intractable issue as regards the system.