James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Deputy for the question. I am committed to increasing the supports available to students and to addressing the costs of education for students and their families progressively over this year and the coming years for as long as I am privileged to serve in this office.

It is important to say that all proposals made regarding education expenditure, including student grants, thresholds, limits, awards and so on, are considered annually in the context of the budget. It is in October that these discussions will take place for real. They are already under way and well advanced but that is the time at which decisions will ultimately be made and communicated.

I have already been engaged very intensively on this and I intend to publish an options paper in the near future that will identify the costs and potential impacts of various policy options. There are multiple different levers within the grants system. There are thresholds, monetary amounts and different types of support that can be made available. There are also different types of grants, including fee grants and maintenance grants, and, as Deputy Paul Lawless mentioned earlier, there are also adjacent and non-adjacent rates. There are a number of moving parts and I have tasked my team with coming up with a matrix of all of those parts so that we can see the impact of moving one lever on another lever. Ultimately, we do not want one cohort of students to be deprived of services and support because we have changed something to benefit another cohort. We need to make sure the approach is consistent, coherent, fair and progressive.

The paper I intend to publish will be based on engagement with the sector and with stakeholders. I held an event in Croke Park earlier this year at which I met with multiple different stakeholders from the educational sphere. I met access officers, student's union representatives, people taking up various different courses, people from disadvantaged sectors and spokespersons for people who traditionally have struggled to attain the education they wished to attain. All of those voices will be heard in the discussion.

On the Deputy's specific question regarding the threshold, the special rate of maintenance threshold will increase from €26,200 to €27,400 this September. All other maintenance and student contribution grant thresholds will increase by 15% so there is already quite a significant increase coming this September. The postgraduate fee threshold will also increase to match the new 100% student contribution threshold, which will now be €64,315. That means a household with a net income of up to €115,000 will still benefit from grant support.

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