VEC reassures students on college grants

Meath VEC chief Peter Kierans has moved this week to reassure local students and parents that third-level grants would be processed and there would be no danger of college places being lost as a result of delays. The VEC chief executive officer hit out at reports in sections of the media on Monday which claimed that some students could be thrown out of college over delays in processing maintenance grants. He said that applicants in this county can be reassured that the VEC is well on top of the task of processing grants. Mr Kierans said it was a pity a picture was being painted of students being refused education because of delays in processing grants. "In my long experience, I have never come across a case of a student put out of college because his or her grants had not been processed," he said. There have been complaints in some parts of the country about delays in processing maintenance grants and it has been claimed that up to 50 students a week are leaving third-level education because of the delays. The backlog in paying grants is said to have arisen because of an increase in demasnd and cutbacks in the number of staff who process applications. However, a different picture has emerged in Meath VEC even though, as the VEC CEO put it, it has been faced with a difficult task in processing all the applications it has received. Mr Kierans said he was speaking out this week to reassure applicants and parents that they were "on top of the job". The CEO said that there had been a huge upsurge in the number of applications for maintenance grants in Meath this year - up from 800 last year to 1,200 this year. A number of measures were introduced within the VEC in order to ease the task of processing. The grants department was reorganised with extra staff being redeployed from other sections of the VEC. Staff who had been entitled to periods of leave put them off in order to deal with the flow of grant applications. "We had to reduce people's personal access and phone access to us to discuss individual grants. That was to allow staff to get on with the job of dealing with the application forms and processing the information in them," Mr Kierans said. At this stage, 50 per cent of the applicants have been grant-aided and the remainder have not sufficient data on their forms to enable them to be processed and these people are being contacted by mobile phone text in order to update their forms. Just 117 have been refused grant aid. The CEO said that all kind of information was needed to enable the VEC to process applications. "There may be various streams of income coming into a household and all these have to be taken into account. In other cases, there may have been marriage separations and people would have to provide information about the way incomes are divided. There may be changes in circumstances from last year when people were in full employment, and may be unemployed or in part-time work this year," he added. However, a lot of preparatory work had been done in preparing applicants for the form-filling exercise. A workshop on the subject, in which applicants and parents were supplied with information and eight teachers answered individual queries, held in the Ardboyne Hotel in Navan in early August was "packed out". Individual schools in the VEC system were also contacted. Applicants were faced with complex applications forms and about half of all applicants to Meath VEC did not have adequate data on the forms and are being contacted to come up with additional information. The CEO said that, despite the fact that the VEC had lost five staff on an "already low" staff quota, staff had "performed magnificantly" in processing the applications. He praised in particular Bernadette Walsh, in the corporate and education applications section, Mary Keane in the grants section, and three other staff members, Georgina Coyle, Geraldine Smith and Claire Kennedy, for their work in the run-up to and during the grants applications period.