Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)
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To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the criteria that had to be met by Dublin City Vocational Education Committee to win the tendering for administering third level applications under Student Universal Support Ireland including the allocation of staff and resources to replace the 66 VECs and local authorities that processed applications up until 2011. [51346/12]

Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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In January 2011, the Department issued an Expression of Interest invitation to the VECs, local authorities or other public bodies who might be interested in taking on administrative responsibility for the centralised student grants awarding and payments function. A total of 10 proposals were received. These proposals were examined by an independent selection panel against the evaluation criteria which was an integral part of the Expression of Interest procedure. Four of these proposals were short-listed for oral presentation. Following this, the selection panel made a recommendation to the Minister for Education and Skills on the preferred proposal which was the City of Dublin VEC proposal to establish Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI) as a unit of itself.

The selection panel evaluated the proposals under the following criteria: organisational capacity to perform the function; experience in dealing with comparable schemes/services; existing core management, expertise and resources available to be deployed to the function; capacity to deliver strong cost and efficiency benefits; overall quality of the proposal for delivery of a central student grants function.

Student Universal Support Ireland (SUSI)'s proposal was underpinned by a staffing of 65 whole-time equivalents, thereby reducing the number of administration staff currently operating the system in the 66 grant awarding bodies by some 105 posts once the transition is complete. The 65 whole-time equivalents would be made up a combination of core staff which would be employed all year round and seasonal staff. This provided for the staff in SUSI to rise during the peak processing months.