Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 18 January 2024
80. Deputy Brendan Griffin asked the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science to outline his priorities for 2024, in particular if he will consider how SUSI can help more students and their families; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2062/24]
View answerThis question is to ask the Minister to outline to the House his priorities for 2024. Can he refer to SUSI and what improvements we will see this year for students? What will that mean for those individual students?
It is my priority in 2024 to continue to drive down the cost of education. I am pleased that the Government and the Fine Gael political party have managed to reduce fees for more than 96,000 students for two years in a row now. This is putting €1,000 back in the pockets of families right across the country. I want to see more progress in relation to that. I want to continue to see us reducing the cost of education so that education will be accessible to everyone.
I want to see things like the renter's tax credit being expanded for the first time to include a parent who pays for his or her child's rent while that child is in college. I want to see that being embedded and I want all parents in Kerry and across the country to know that if you pay for your child's rent, you can claim the €750 tax credit this year. If such children were in college accommodation last year or the year before, people can seek to get it backdated for €500 for each of those two proceeding years.
I want to roll out more student accommodation. We will see accommodation going to construction at DCU and Maynooth this year. I want to make progress on other student accommodation projects that colleges have planning permission for. For the first time in the history of the State, I want to work with the regions and the technological universities to get student accommodation proposals in, which I want done in the first quarter of this year. I want to see an expansion of our apprenticeship programme in order that we can build our homes, retrofit our homes, meet and exceed our housing and climate targets and provide people with more pathways to education and qualifications.
At the end of this month, I intend to outline major new programmes for people with a disability, particularly people with an intellectual disability, to access third-level education after they leave school. I want to see the provision of part-time courses and providing funding for people who do part-time education, because not everybody can go to college, pack their bags and go full time. People are holding down jobs, people are trying to pay mortgages, people are trying to raise kids or care for a parent. This is a matter of funding for part-time courses.
I want to help businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, with the cost of upskilling and reskilling their employees. We will announce programmes regarding both of those initiatives in the coming weeks.
As I said, for two years in a row, we have reduced the student contribution fee. We have brought back postgraduate grants for the first time in 13 years. We have increased all our student grants, effective from last week. We have increased the amount of income you can earn while still qualifying for a number of supports. As I said, this year, I want to embed the changes in part-time education to make sure people who are doing part-time education can also access support with their fees.
I thank the Minister. That is a comprehensive suite of measures that he has secured in the most recent budget and over a number of years. I welcome that. It makes a massive difference to students and their families all over the country. At a Government level, these things might seem like a small change but they can be hugely significant for families, for people who are struggling and for those who are trying to improve their futures and prospects. I welcome every measure that has been taken to date.
There are always things that people in our constituencies will contact us about in order that they can have them changed and improved. I urge the Minister to continue his work in trying to ensure that the costs of third-level education and further education are reduced for as many people as possible. One area in particular that I want to be looked at is the SUSI thresholds because we need to be cognisant of them, given inflation and wage inflation.
I will mention one particular area about which a woman outlined her story to me some time ago. I have raised this previously with the Minister and I want to raise it again, namely, the case of widows, widowers and SUSI. Their scenario needs to be looked at and we need to see if we can do something exceptional for people in that scenario because it is extremely difficult, as the Minister knows, for parents on one income to put children through college. In a case where there is one income that is reasonably good but where there are numerous children, people can get caught in that trap as well.
I agree with the Deputy on both issues and I will look at that widows and widowers issue. I want to look more comprehensively at an overhaul of SUSI to make sure the thresholds are right, that it is supporting people and families across the country and that it is agile enough to understand that people learn in different ways. That is why the part-time change is an important one.
The Deputy is also right about thresholds. There are often people who just about get by. They work hard and do everything right and they find they are just above a threshold and do not qualify for something. That is why I have been determined that when we have been bringing in supports for students and their families, when we reduce the college fees we reduce them for everybody. Anybody who was in a full-time undergraduate course, which is about 96,000 people, got the fee reduction regardless of a means test. Call them what you wish but the squeezed middle, namely, that group of people who find they never qualify for the support, can still be struggling to get by in the cost-of-living crisis. That is why we gave that €1,000 back before Christmas. I meet these people across the country and I know the substantial difference that made to many people.
On the income thresholds and SUSI, in particular, we have a massive shortage of skills and labour in the tourism and hospitality sector and there is a disincentive for many young people. I worked right through college and school, on weekends and even on weeknights, to try to help pay my way through college. For the SUSI gross income consideration, all of that income should be disregarded or there should be stronger disregards. It is an area I ask the Minister to look at. Not only would it benefit the families and students involved but it would also benefit the wider economy, including the hospitality businesses that are struggling to attract people to work in their restaurants, bars and cafés, as well as other retailers across the economy where there is a shortage of labour. There should never be a disincentive to work in this economy and country but some of those disincentives remain and it is an area the Minister could possibly examine with his colleagues in government around the Cabinet table. The Minister might see if he can come up with a better solution to ensure there is always an incentive for people to work, particularly people who are trying to support themselves through college.
I will do that. Deputy Griffin is entirely right; if you go into a café, hotel, pub or shop, people will tell you it can be hard to attract staff. There are many students who are working, who need to work and who want to work but they are worried that if they work too many hours, they might go over the threshold and lose their student grants. The good news is that progress has been made on this with the holiday earnings deduction, as it is called. The amount of income you can earn and have disregarded has increased from €4,500 in 2022 and 2023 to €6,552 currently and I intend to try to make more progress on that in the budgets ahead.
More generally, we have made improvements to the income thresholds, although I accept we have more to do. For example, the reckonable income threshold for a student contribution grant has increased from €62,000 to €100,000. If you have a household income of €100,000 or less, you are eligible for some support in respect of fee reduction. From this September, for the new college year, the income thresholds for students to receive a maintenance grant is increasing to €50,840, up from €46,790, and we will endeavour to build on this.
