Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)
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723. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if the Government expenditure on the free fees initiative contributes towards calculations of Government spending on research and development; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [21149/23]

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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Free fees, together with the recurrent grant, collectively constitute the State’s contribution to the ‘core’ funding of higher education institutions (HEIs), that is, the funding of the key missions of teaching, learning and research. These are allocated as a block grant by my Department to the HEA for direct disbursement to the designated HEIs and, together with academic fees and other (non-Exchequer) sources of income, fund their core operations.

Core operations include the costs of academic staff, departmental expenditure, academic services and support services. On the basis that the HERD survey (Higher Education R&D) seeks to capture the totality of research expenditure funded by government, including indirect expenditure, it is appropriate to include funding associated with free fees, which support research activity as a government contribution, when calculating the proportion of block grant allocated to research expenditure. This is consistent with the guidelines of the OECD’s Frascati Manual, which is the internationally recognised methodology for collecting and using R&D statistics. The free fees proportion is not reported separately by the HEIs in the HERD survey.

The 2020 HERD survey was published recently and is available at the link below:

www.gov.ie/en/publication/5e329-higher-education-research-and-development-survey-2020-to-2021/