‘Rushing public service reform poses a risk’

Rushing public service reforms, or doing so without key data, poses a risk to effective change of delivery, according to an assessment of lessons from the early difficulties of a centralised student grants body.

The report on the 2012 start-up of Student Universal Support Ireland (Susi) affirms findings of previous reports that the handover of grant processing was hampered by delays getting the right staffing levels and an underestimation of the volume of work.

But the study for the Department of Education also stresses that the kind of justified political and media criticisms that the project attracted in its first year of operation should not deter other major public service reform projects. One of the major problems that caused long delays to thousands of students applying to Susi, which now handles almost all college grant applications, was that it did not have enough baseline information.