Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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Question 69: To ask the Minister for Education and Skills his plans to change the current criteria governing the allocation of maintenance grants for students attending third level education. [13944/11]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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The Deputy will be aware that the student grant measures announced in Budget 2011 by the previous Fianna Fáil - Green Party Government began to come into effect from January this year when a reduction of 4% in the rates of grant was applied to all student grant recipients. Further to this, budget measures that will come into effect from next September for the 2011/12 academic year will change the assessment of the qualifying distance criterion for the non-adjacent rate of grant from 24 kilometres to 45 kilometres and mature students will no longer have an automatic entitlement to the non-adjacent rate of grant.

The Deputy will appreciate that given current economic circumstances I regret that I am not in a position to reverse the changes made to the student grant schemes. As a matter of routine, my Department prepares policy proposals on the student grant schemes each year. For the coming academic year, these will include the budgetary measures I have alluded to already and the annual review of the reckonable income limits contained in the schemes. This year, a more fundamental review is also being undertaken in order to consolidate the four existing student grant schemes into a single unified scheme as part of my Department's overall student grants reform programme. I expect to be able to publish this scheme shortly.