Results 81-100 of 5,782 for speaker:James Lawless

Written Answers — Department of Education and Skills: Grant Payments (1 Apr 2025)

James Lawless: One of the criteria in the student grant scheme relates to 'progression'. This means that a student must be moving from year to year within a course, having successfully completed the previous year or be transferring from one course to another, where the award for the subsequent course is of a higher level than the previous course. The objective of this policy is to help as many students as...

Written Answers — Department of Education and Skills: Education and Training Provision (1 Apr 2025)

James Lawless: Reply not received from Department.

Written Answers — Department of Education and Skills: Departmental Funding (1 Apr 2025)

James Lawless: The provision of Higher Education funding on an annual basis is part of overall expenditure management and budgetary policy for Government. As such, indexing does not apply. In 2025 the planned recurrent grant allocation for the sector totals €1.667 billion. This is an increase of more than €541 million, or 48%, compared to the 2019 outturn in the year prior to the formation...

Written Answers — Department of Education and Skills: Early Childhood Care and Education (1 Apr 2025)

James Lawless: Under the Free Fees Initiative (FFI), the State provides funding toward the tuition fee costs of eligible undergraduate students who are attending approved courses. In the 2023/24 academic year, there were over 143,000 students who benefited from the FFI. Currently FFI approved courses are restricted to full-time undergraduate courses in the public higher education system and a limited...

Written Answers — Department of Education and Skills: Departmental Funding (1 Apr 2025)

James Lawless: The Deputy will be aware that Marino Institute of Education (MIE) is a private higher education institution. MIE is not in receipt of core funding from my Department. However, I understand that it receives some limited funding for approved teacher training activities from the Department of Education. MIE is an approved institution for SUSI grants purposes. It is also an approved...

Written Answers — Department of Education and Skills: Departmental Funding (1 Apr 2025)

James Lawless: Marino Institute of Education (MIE) is a private higher education institution. MIE is not in receipt of core funding from my Department. However, I understand that it receives some limited funding for approved teacher training activities from the Department of Education. As a private college the day to day operation of the organisation, including issues surrounding campus maintenance and...

Written Answers — Department of Education and Skills: Education Costs (1 Apr 2025)

James Lawless: The Programme for Government commits to reducing the student contribution in a financially sustainable manner, over the lifetime of this Government. As part of the cost-of-living packages in the last three budgets, the student contribution was reduced by €1,000 on a temporary basis, at a net cost of circa €99 million per annum. These measures were in response to particular cost...

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Third Level Fees (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: Or indeed Donogh O'Malley or many others could be referenced in this debate. My party has always prized education and put it to the fore. Education is the bridge to all that we do as an economy and subsequently as a society because it is the private enterprise, created by a successful education system, that creates the public good and the resources that we then use to support the public...

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Qualifications Recognition (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: I thank the Deputy. On her last point about the constituent's query, if she wants to send that to my office I will happily take a look at the details of it. I will say, based on prior knowledge before I was ever a Minister in this Department, the Teaching Council has a particular set of requirements. Somebody even within the State may come a cropper - the Deputy mentioned, I think,...

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Qualifications Recognition (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: On the Deputy's Teaching Council case, I will take the details away but it is not uncommon, unfortunately, that people have different levels of accreditation or recognition within the system, notwithstanding the Teaching Council registration. I am not going to make any comment on the individual's situation. I do not know but if it is of any assistance, I have come across a case in my own...

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Qualifications Recognition (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: For which professions?

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Qualifications Recognition (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: I think we can because my own sister is a doctor who qualified in Australia and returned to Ireland and is now practising. It is evidently happening, from personal experience. On the wider arrangement, I recently spent time in India on a St. Patrick's Day trade mission. I was engaged on the reciprocal arrangements there, of which there are many. We have a reciprocal arrangement with...

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Third Level Fees (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: I thank Deputy Kenny, and I will treat with the programme for Government commitments and the rest later. I would be interested to know whether the Deputy agreed with the rest of my comments in that article because I did talk about targeted supports. I talked about addressing the cost of education and improving access to education. I talked about the existing support schemes and whether...

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Third Level Fees (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: I thank the Deputy. We are in a new Government; I am a new Minister. We have had an election. The outworking of that election is a coalition Government. Not every policy of every party is going to be fulfilled. No party won a majority.

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Third Level Fees (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: Yes, the programme for Government will be honoured. The programme for Government commits to a reduction in the student contribution fee in a financially sustainable way, which I will do, of course. I am not going to renege on a programme for Government commitment. I am going to follow it fully but how do we do that? Is it abolition, as Deputy Boyd Barrett argues for? That is €1.5...

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Student Accommodation (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: Indeed. I am actively engaged with the university and will be there again as soon as tomorrow. I hope there will be ongoing engagement into the future.

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Institutes of Technology (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: I am aware of the Deputy's ongoing advocacy for all things Dundalk, and, indeed, for Louth. We have discussed her interest in this matter previously, most recently when I attended the opening of the new FET centre in Dundalk, which involved a very significant Government commitment of almost €30 million in the education space for the region. I was delighted to open the centre, along...

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Institutes of Technology (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: Regarding the policy framework, I do not foresee any blockage. However, there is a technical difficulty, which is why DkIT has not already been subsumed. The Technological Universities Act 2018 provided that two or more institutes of technology could jointly seek technological university designation through a process. At that time, a number of applications were invited. DkIT's governing...

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Institutes of Technology (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: As I said, I have had an informal meeting with the president of DkIT. I have studied the situation and am very familiar with it. DkIT is something of an outlier in that most of the ITs have been assimilated at this stage. The direction of travel is to have stronger collaborations in order to achieve a sum that is greater than the parts. That is already being done very successfully in many...

Ceisteanna Eile - Other Questions: Qualifications Recognition (27 Mar 2025)

James Lawless: As the Deputy correctly noted, the European directive on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications ceased to have general applicability to UK award holders post Brexit, that is, after December 2020. Qualifications from the UK were automatically recognised during the transitional period, which ran from 1 February to 31 December 2020. If a qualification was recognised during that...