Ms Rita Walsh:

From my own experience, when my daughter was in sixth class in 2002, the mother of a classmate of hers had a baby with Down's syndrome. Last year, a girl who was four years ahead of her, and who was actually in the same school as her, had a baby with Down's syndrome. Recently, I heard that a classmate of hers had a baby with Down's syndrome. Society has caught up. As Ms Finn said, the children of today are going to school and sitting in classrooms with children with Down's syndrome and all sorts of disabilities. That will go up through life with them.

I believe there is a culture and an environment where people want to do the right thing. They want to be inclusive. It is a question of how you make it happen from there.

For employers, there is fear. There is a fear of getting it wrong. There is a fear of it not working out. In some ways, I can understand that fear. That is why it is so important that the supports are there to allow them to do it right. Also, maybe it would be lovely to start to applaud those who have got it right and to make them the heroes. I refer to the ones who have got it right and made good, comfortable, fair and equal environments for their employees.

Teachers now at least receive some training modules in disability. It obviously can only be limited. A teacher may have received training on aspects of how people with Down's syndrome learn or the challenges they are posed with but that will not provide everything because people with Down's syndrome, like all other people, are a spectrum of people and have a variety of challenges and strengths. If a bank of information could be available to teachers - maybe this is the case - within the Department, a teacher who is teaching a child with a specific disability could go to that bank of information and get more specific information that would help him or her in the classroom and help the other classmates in the school as well.