Adult Education (Hansard, 28 March 2000)

§ Mr. Ingram

The Comprehensive Spending Review, which set public expenditure priorities for Government Departments in 1999–2000 and beyond, provided additional funding in education to develop Government policy of Lifelong Learning in a number of directions such as:

Increasing places in further and higher education;
establishing the University for Industry and Individual Learning Accounts in Northern Ireland, and
putting in place actions to address significant problems of adult literacy and numeracy.

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Inevitably, however, reductions had to be made in a number of student support programmes to allow priorities to be clearly targeted and, as a consequence, some difficult decisions had to be made. Underpinning these decisions was the objective of concentrating available resources on those students awards which support domestic provision and which have the most economic relevance to Northern Ireland, such as research studentships.

In light of this it was decided not to continue to fund the very small number of awards usually made available to Northern Ireland students wishing to undertake courses at residential institutions for adult education in Great Britain from 1999–2000 academic year.

Nevertheless, support has been sustained for adult education access courses to higher education in Northern Ireland, both through continuing bursaries available at Magee College, University of Ulster and, more importantly, through funding of higher education access courses provided by the Further Education and Higher Education Colleges in conjunction with the local universities. These provide a very important domestic route to higher education for mature students in Northern Ireland who would otherwise be unable to enter higher education through conventional academic channels.