Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I think it will remove any excuses about universities needing to hike up student accommodation costs. The sector now agrees that €307 million is needed and if we provide that, we need to start to see fair play on a number of these important issues. The €307 million will drive down the student-staff ratio. It is about 19:1 or 20:1 in Ireland. The EU average is about 14:1 or 15:1. It will get us to the EU average and mean that we are funding higher education at a similar level to Sweden. It will mean we are investing €2,000 more per student, per year in their education. Five themes are set out for reforms, including access and better links between further education. I give the example of a nurse who does a post-leaving certificate course, PLC. We cannot have a situation where someone can do wonderfully well in a PLC in nursing and not get a place in a graduate course for a nursing degree. There are five themes for reform in the group chaired by Professor Anne Looney, Professor Tom Collins and I, which will meet for the first time next week.

Core funding is one part of the plan. The cost of education is another part. The Government has agreed to take a two-pronged approach, with a gradual reduction in the registration fee and a significant increase in the SUSI student grant scheme. We have outlined a number of things that need to happen with the SUSI student grant scheme, including making sure the grants increase more in line with the cost of living. The review reckons that the grants need to increase by 25% to get back to where they need to be. We also need to make decisions about funding part-time students under SUSI. We have started, in the budgets that we voted for, to increase student grants, reducing the distance that a student has to live from college to qualify for a larger grant and increasing the income threshold. I expect to be in a position to introduce another package of student supports in budget 2023 to improve SUSI further.

See this speech in context