Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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49. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the number of medicine and nursing places that have already been filled by those that deferred and or who sat their leaving certificate in November 2020; the number of additional nursing and medicine places that will be added for Irish and EU students in 2021; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [36805/21]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Universities and Institutes of Technology are autonomous and determine their own procedures for admission. The CAO process applications for undergraduate, and some postgraduate, courses on their behalf.

Decisions on admissions, including in relation to deferrals, are made by the higher education institutions who then instruct the CAO to make offers to successful candidates. Therefore information on deferrals is held by the HEIs and the CAO, not my Department and I do not have access to the information requested. Typically the number of deferrals on any course is limited by the HEI in question.

It is my understanding that a total of 632 CAO offers, 595 of which are for Level 8 courses, have been made to students whose results in the 2020 written Leaving Certificate examinations brought them into consideration for a higher preference offer, based on their 2020 CAO application. These students will have the option to take up these offers for the 2021 academic year. While the offers have already been confirmed to students, they will be formally made as part of CAO Round A, which takes place in July. These offers represent a very small proportion of the offers to be made in 2021. In 2020 a total of 96,426 CAO offers were made overall, of which 58,895 were for Level 8 courses.

My officials have been working with the HEA and the Higher Education Institutions to identify where there is scope for additional places to be provided. In addition to higher education, I would like to highlight the range of options available in further education and training and apprenticeships. These options can serve both as an alternate pathway to a chosen career or an alternate pathway into higher education. For students who are not successful in gaining an offer for their course of choice in the first instance, there are alternate routes available to them to reach their preferred option.