Debate contribution: Reducing Barriers to All-Ireland Student Mobility

Debate contribution by Mr David Honeyford on 28 April 2025.

MLA

Mr David Honeyford

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

28 April 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Reducing Barriers to All-Ireland Student Mobility

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4914069

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Madam Principal Deputy Speaker. Alliance believes in having a shared society, building a united community and providing greater opportunities for everyone. A few weeks back, I talked about sharing the island and working towards solutions for our economy and in health and education and a more prosperous future for everyone that creates opportunities and grows possibilities here. Alliance believes that we should work towards increased student mobility on the island of Ireland. We also have kids who move across to GB. This creates different and greater opportunities for students here, which is welcome. We recognise the critical role that our education establishments play in our economy in diversifying our skills and through educational and student life. We welcome the diversity of opinion. Bringing people here brings strength: it challenges us and further strengthens and unites our community. In the Economy Committee, I have talked about CAO and the entrance requirements for Northern students for some time. I have lived it: my daughter is studying at Trinity College Dublin, so, as a family, we went through the CAO system. My son went to Loughborough University in England via the UCAS process, so I can compare. In 1998, approximately 10% of students in Trinity were from Northern Ireland. Today, that figure is less than 1%, so there is a massive issue that needs to be resolved. Although I welcome the changes that Pádraig talked through, including the need for a fourth A level being downgraded to an AS level, the issue is far from sorted, which is the reason for our amendment. We are trying to help and work towards solutions that mean that we see students moving North to South. The number of Southern students who apply to study in the North also needs to be noted: it has trebled in the past five years. The number of students from the South who are being accepted in Northern Ireland has trebled, yet the number of students from Northern Ireland who are accepted into universities in the Republic of Ireland remains low. I want to talk about three key issues. One is grade disparity. The number of points required to achieve entry into the South's universities has meant, up to this point, that Northern Ireland students have had to study an extra A level; now, it will be an AS level instead. However, it is more than that: they need A* grades across the board to gain entry, so there is no grade comparison. The CAO points requirement is unjust on our students. With four A levels at A*, a Northern student would still get only 600 points. They get 25 points if they study maths, but that has always been the case. I will use Trinity as an example, as it is one that I know, although the issue is not exclusive to it.

A Northern student cannot gain entry to a variety of courses there, including pharmacy, medicine, law and politics, as well as a range of science subjects.

The prospective entry requirements to study pharmacy, to take that as an example, at Queen's University are two As and a B. That works out at 443 points under the CAO system. If any Northern students had wanted to study pharmacy at Trinity last year, they would have needed 613 points, which they could not have achieved even with four A* grades. They would therefore have had to have done maths as one of their subjects. That is a discrepancy that has to be addressed. That imbalance — that unjust requirement — for our students is one of the key issues. Our students study three A levels as a default. When the system is flawed, very few Northern students have any chance of getting a place at Trinity, University College Dublin (UCD), the University of Galway or wherever. The standards do not align. Our system is based on three A levels. Whether that is the best way of doing 16-18 education is a debate for another day, but that is currently what our students study. They take three A levels, and the 600 points should equate to those three A levels so that students here have the ability to get the score to meet the entry requirement to access a place in the South. On a side note, COVID has also increased the differential. Our results have come back down after COVID, but that has not happened in the South. The other major problem for Northern students is that they are not offered a place in the South. That is something that we lived out as a family. Under the UCAS system, students get offered a place. They get an offer and know with certainty that, if they get the grades, they have got a place, be it at Queen's University, the University of Ulster or anywhere else. Under the CAO system, that does not happen. Students therefore do not know until the day on which the Leaving Cert results come out what place they have been awarded. The Leaving Cert results come out two weeks after our A-level results. If you are a student here, you therefore put at risk your place at university in order to wait to find out, basically via a lottery, whether you are going to gain a place at a university in the South. You either cannot confirm the place that you have or have to defer it. In our case, my daughter, Emma, deferred her place. She had a place at University College London (UCL), but she wanted to go to Trinity. She therefore took the decision that she was prepared to take a year out if she did not get a place at Trinity. It is absolutely ridiculous for an 18-year-old to have to make the decision to defer part of her life based on the lottery that is getting into a university in the South. It means that the hopes and dreams of our young people are being left to a lottery. Their immediate future is being put on hold. That is not fair. I know that the issue of allowing students from here access is outside the control of our Minister of Education, but it is one that he needs to continue to raise with his counterpart in the South. Advice from schools is another major issue. Again, I speak from experience, but I have spoken to quite a few people about it, and it is a common issue. The careers advice that we got at school was on applying through UCAS. There was very limited help, if any, for applying through CAO. It was basically left to students themselves to apply. They had to remember the closing date and go on ahead and do it themselves. I remember going to a parents' evening. We were simply told that the closing date for applying through CAO was in February and that we should go online to get the information. An email would have been much more useful, because the link to the CAO application would have been in there, rather than my having to go look for it. How to apply through CAO is therefore not explained or supported by schools here, meaning that students have to complete the application process on their own. The implications of that are that students do not know that they get 25 extra points for maths. If they do not know that and do not pick that subject when they are 16, how can they ever get those extra 25 points? Moreover, they need a language at GCSE. I know that most students study a language at GCSE but, if they do not, they are ruling themselves out from studying any course at university in the South. We therefore need to advise our students and make sure that that advice is in front of them when they are making career decisions. We talk a lot in the Economy Committee about careers advice and decisions. When those decisions are happening in your life, you need to know at that point that you are not limiting yourself. That advice needs to come through from the Department of Education to schools so that schools are not solely emphasising UCAS but are offering and addressing CAO options, leaving those open for everyone. I will leave it there. Those are the three key issues for us, and we have laid them out in our amendment. We need the Minister to continue to work to make this a fair, equality issue for our students. We need the Department of Education to highlight the issues that are there, so that all schools provide our kids with all the opportunities in order that we can build a better, shared society for all. Thank you, Madam Principal Deputy Speaker.

1,467 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:28 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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