Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I ran out of time when referring to student accommodation. The Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, and I, along with the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, are working intensively to make sure that our technological universities can borrow for the very first time and start to build student accommodation. In Deputy Stanton's part of the world, for example, it opens up opportunities for the Munster Technological University also.

The Deputy asked a very interesting question about hybrid learning. We are trying to start a conversation by recognising that not every student is 18 or 19 years of age, and not every student wants the traditional full college experience. More and more we are going to see students in full-time employment, with dependants, with a job or with a mortgage, who will need to access part of the education system. This is where the hybrid model becomes very attractive, or indeed the remote learning option. We introduced a range of emergency measures during Covid across education to keep the show on the road. We now want to sit down with education stakeholders to see what good learning can be had from that, that we want to see embedded in the education system. In a county as large as the Deputy's constituency, where people can live quite a distance from a college, there is a particular appeal to making education available in remote working hubs or online at home.

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