Mr. Barry McGinn:

To respond to Deputy Tully on the question of vision, from our presentation, she will have seen that NLN and the Rehab Group operate within the mainstream and a specialist setting. Our vision would be to promote access to education for all people with disabilities. We envisage a model where all of the needs of people with mild, moderate, severe and profound disabilities can be met within an overall education ecosystem with mainstream provision, student support services and specialist training for people who need higher levels of support.

In my presentation, I alluded to an example of the further education and training, FET, college of the future, which is something our colleagues in SOLAS and the ETBs have been taking from page to stage over the past 18 months since the launch of the FET strategy. That model envisages multi-campus delivery with effectively one front door albeit virtually. From our point of view, segmenting services as one thing or the other does not serve anybody. Many of the concerns that have been expressed here today have been around transitioning and moving - whether that is from secondary to post-secondary or training to employment. This suggests that we have a good bit of work to do in respect of achieving this seamless movement. The model should be that there is a level of need that is met by different agencies or organisations at different times and in different ways with some people requiring more intensive support at certain times and later being able to progress to less support or different forms of support over time. That would be our vision for the FET space.