Dr. Joanne McCarthy:

I thank the committees and we will take them up on their offer to come back to further enhance information and support them in their deliberations. There were a lot of interesting questions and I do not know where any of us will start. I apologise if I forget or misinterpret something.

With regard to the statistics asked about by the Co-Chairman, Deputy O'Loughlin, according to the census approximately 30% of people with a disability are born with it. I will have to clarify this, but this is my understanding. What is very interesting is that one in four adults will acquire a disability. That is a stark figure. This is one we have to think about, because often when we talk about employment and transitioning we have in our heads a very set understanding of who are the disabled, and they are those who are born and growing up with a disability. Of course, they have very specific issues and very specific responses will be required, but for most people the disability is acquired. They are already in employment and have already gone through education, if they are going to do it. They are parents. The initiatives and interventions need to be very different for these people and we need to think very differently about this.

We could be speaking to any committee here today, but we would all agree that the point of transition is when disablement becomes most acute. It is significantly experienced in education. There is definitely not enough planning well in advance for transition points. Other jurisdictions begin to plan well in advance for transitioning for people with a disability when they are 13 or 14 but we do not do this here. We have demographics information. We know and we can pretty much predict how and when people will start to transition. We can predict when their needs will change. We can also generally predict the age and they types of neurological conditions in question, but we are not using what we have to hand to help inform the decisions we make.

A couple of weeks ago I went before another committee to discuss the public sector duty. It is under-appreciated at present that the public sector duty requires each Department to disability-proof public policies, procedures and budgets. What this meeting of committees will enable us to do is to stop Departments doing it in a systematic way and demand that if they are planning, through the public sector duty, to disability-proof they should make sure they also look at other Departments to see what the knock-on effects will be for others. We ask for a public sector duty and for Departments to think systemically about how their decisions have an impact on other Departments.

We always question who decides what pilots are sustained and what pilots are not. Under the make work pay programme, a significant amount of work was done on good quality engagement with people with disabilities to try to figure out what works for them. If pilots are being considered, the decisions of what should be further sustained, in terms of what should become part of ongoing options for people with disabilities, need to be determined hugely by how people with disabilities themselves experience it. Do not just have a cold top-down approach to evaluation but think about how the services are experienced. Some of the activation measures happening at present provide perfect examples. If people are not job ready they are not welcome. This tells us an awful lot, when we consider how many people with disabilities listening to the complexity of the issues we are putting on the table are really job ready at any moment in time, and how many can initiate a job and sustain it without some level of intervention, even if it is only at the initial stages. This is definitely something for the committees to consider.

A point about community life was raised. This goes a little bit beyond employment. Most people with disabilities are living in our communities. They are part of the most marginalised groups in our committees. They are living in the family home with ageing parents. They are living with acquired brain injuries in families that are breaking down as a result. They are people with significant mental health issues who are our neighbours. They are in our communities. When we think about disabilities we are not thinking about how our resources enable those people to be part of community life. A key part of this is about using mainstream resources in these communities. The education and training boards have a huge role to play in enhancing the capacity of people with disabilities in work and education. The further education sector is a very under-appreciated enabler for our sector, and it is a hugely unappreciated connector for people into their local communities. I encourage the committees to think about this. When we think about activation employment, the costs associated with disabilities and the poverty people are in, we have to think about where people are. Most people are not in a position to go to third level education at any particular point. They are elsewhere. They are those hidden marginalised people in our communities who need to be connected to where there are genuine opportunities. I encourage the committees to think this way.

I raised the issue of the passport and, unfortunately, my colleague who is the expert in this area could not attend today because she is an annual leave - she will probably kill me. We have used the concept of a passport in terms of looking at how assistive technology is used to transition. We have used the concept that people should not have to look to go back all the time. If people come out of education and are now looking for a job their need for technology does not change. People should just transition and they should have a passport. The concept of a passport is a nice way to demand interfaces between Departments, agencies, systems and supports.