Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

The Deputy will be aware that the student grant measures announced in budget 2011 by the previous Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government began to come into effect from January this year when a reduction of 4% in the rates of grant was applied to all student grant recipients. Further to this, budget measures that will come into effect from next September for the 2011 to 2012 academic year will change the assessment of the qualifying distance criterion for the non-adjacent rate of grant, from 24 kilometres to 45 kilometres, and mature students will no longer have an automatic entitlement to the non-adjacent rate of grant.

The Deputy will appreciate that given current economic circumstances I regret that I am not in a position to reverse the changes made to the qualifying distance criteria or to introduce another adjacent rate of grant category into the student grant schemes. As a matter of routine, my Department prepares policy proposals on the student grant schemes each year. For the coming academic year, these will include the budgetary measures I have alluded to already and the annual review of the reckonable income limits contained in the schemes. This year, a more fundamental review is also being undertaken in order to consolidate the four existing student grant schemes into a single unified scheme as part of my Department's overall student grants reform programme.

Student grant schemes have a fundamental role to play in ensuring equality of access to higher education and our scarce resources should be targeted towards those most in need of assistance. The introduction of further reforms, including improvements to the way in which assessments are carried out, will be facilitated by consolidation of the administration function in a single grant awarding authority, which is due to take place from 2012.

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