Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will begin by commending the students, student unions and various bodies that took to the streets this afternoon to call on the Government to take urgent action in the upcoming budget to address the many crises facing young people and students. I commend Trinity College’s students and union for the action they have taken in recent weeks in response to Trinity's board increasing rents at a time when it is impossible for students to meet basic meets, never mind contend with such increases.

The issue of access to third level and higher education is a multifaceted one. This debate has mostly focused on the steps that can be taken by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science to improve access to third level, but there is a duty on every Department to ensure young people have the building blocks to achieve their full educational potential from early childhood, given the lack of diversity in further and higher education as a direct consequence of poverty, deprivation and inequality. If we continue to view certain matters in an isolated way, for example, access to education, as only being at one point in time that someone needs to overcome, we will not take in the full sense of that person’s world, including the intergenerational aspect. Some people believe it is just a matter of the person needing to know that college is accessible to him or her, but it is so much more than that. Sometimes, attending college does not enter your arena of thought as a possibility for you to even begin thinking about what the barriers to access are. There are many barriers that make it more difficult for young people, especially from working-class backgrounds, to access education, for example, the narrow framing of means testing for Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, grants.

Let us say there is a single mother who is earning a certain amount - maybe she is a hairdresser - or she has a partner working in construction. Her partner never went to university and left school at 13, 14 or 15 years of age. She has no college education herself and grew up in a community where there was little access to education as well as a great deal of intergenerational issues in terms of the professional backgrounds of those families. SUSI and access programmes will look at her child purely through an economic lens. There may be two working parents, bringing the child slightly over the means test, but no one in that family has had an education in generations. This approach is shortsighted and narrow. It views financial capital as the sole reason someone can or cannot access education, but that could not be further from the truth. We need to consider social and cultural capital and the generations that have gone before. When someone applies for a SUSI grant and exceeds the threshold, he or she is out. That person does not go to college. He or she might have been the first person in his or her family who wanted to go to college. If someone happens to get into college but does not qualify for a SUSI grant, that person will not qualify for a back-to-education allowance because he or she is going straight from school. The person’s parents are just about making ends meet, and they are paying for it. I agree with Senator Eugene Murphy on looking at students who make sacrifices, work and so on, but, unfortunately, that is not a possibility for everybody. Unfortunately, there are students who are already coming from a disadvantaged background who will put 20 or 30 hours extra work into just doing the actual work to get through college. If a person goes to a school where the vocabulary is not what exists in the university, that person will have to work extra hard to understand even the words being used in the classroom. They go home and get their dictionary out. They do not have any friends who are in college, so they are not staying behind at the end of the day discussing the subject. They do not have a parent who went to college, so they cannot go home and talk about a very interesting subject that came up in engineering and ask to bounce ideas off them. A student who comes from a very disadvantaged background with no education among any of their family has to do a full-time job just understanding and getting by in the new environment they are in. It is difficult to try to add a job on top of that, whether it is in a shop, factory or anywhere else. It is about the capacity and the overwhelming thought of even being able to do that.

Then, for example, what if someone is neurodiverse in any shape or form? We have to think about when someone has any sensory issues, any dyslexia or any literacy issues. They also have to use all their spare hours outside of the offered college course to put in the extra work. To be able to take on work outside of that is very difficult.