College told to set aside €100k for student services after audiology course cancelled

The college that went ahead with a degree in audiology in 2012 without proper funding or approval has been told to set aside €100,000 of its budget for student services.

The Higher Education Authority (HEA) sanction follows difficulties last summer for 21 students at Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT), first highlighted by the Irish Examiner, who were told the course was being cancelled after completing year one of the four-year course.

Agreement was reached to allow the degree continue for that class only, when HSE placements were approved, but only after two students started High Court proceedings seeking its reinstatement. Some of the class were offered places on a UK degree while awaiting a resolution and 11 are still studying audiology at AIT.

It emerged last August that the HEA told AIT a year earlier not to go ahead with the degree, and was ignored when it ordered its suspension after learning in October 2012 that it proceeded. A national policy on audiologist training was to decide where any courses should be offered, and AIT had no HSE agreement about clinical placements before it enrolled students.

The HEA only provides State funding for approved courses and said last summer it was considering further action to reflect the seriousness of the situation and avoid any recurrence.

Colleges normally have autonomy on how core funding, calculated by student numbers on different course types, is spent. But the HEA has told AIT that €100,000 must now be set aside for student services.

“The €100,000 was meant to be sufficiently large so as to make a statement, but not so big as to cause problems for the institute or result in an inappropriate spike in its funding of students services,” says a note of the HEA’s November meeting.

AIT told the Irish Examiner it is giving the money to the student resource centre over three years, starting this academic year, and it will be used to provide extra counselling hours for students.

A similar approach was taken in relation to unauthorised allowances of over €7m paid by universities to senior staff from 2005 to 2011. The €3.6m, half the value of unapproved payments, that the HEA decided should be ring-fenced for student services will go on more counselling, extended library hours, and extra support for student societies.

AIT claimed last July that the HEA withdrew funding when the course could not get British Academy of Audiology accreditation. But that body said it raised concerns in August 2012 and told AIT in December that year it was withdrawing from the accreditation process.