Mr. Adam Harris:

To start with the employment space, this is something our organisation has been doing quite a lot of work on. Two years ago, we set up a new partnership with IrishJobs.ie, the country’s main employment website. We published a report, which I can send a copy of to the committee, called Autism in the Workplace. In that report, we looked at two things. We surveyed members of our community about their experience looking for work and then we surveyed employers about their openness and attitude in this area. If I was to sum it up broadly, employers are interested in this and want to do something, but are terrified of getting it wrong. That is the main barrier. There is the sense that employers would do something but they do not know what they should do or do not even know where the barriers are. Contrasted with the experience of autistic people, there is a reluctance to even share that they are on the spectrum if they are going for job interviews. Some 75% said they would not tell their employer. There is an awful lot of culture work that will need to be done there to shift it. Sometimes within the workplace, we find it is slightly like a chicken-and-egg situation because, on the one hand, there needs to be more people standing up and saying, “I am autistic and I work here”, which gives other people confidence. However, at the same time, it is very hard to be the first person to do that.

Last year, AsIAm published a toolkit for employers - the Same Chance Toolkit - with IrishJobs.ie. That looks at all of the measures an employer can take from recruitment through to interview, induction and onboarding. It is very important to note that there is a piece of work just about demystifying, because the sorts of accommodations that our community might need are often very minor. It may be, for example, a person wanting to work remotely three days a week because the bus takes so much out of the person in the morning. It might be somebody, for example, needs to wear a certain item of clothing because other clothing may cause irritation. For example, perhaps something like what I am wearing might not be comfortable for every autistic person. It might mean that a person just needs to sit in a particular part of the office where it is less noisy. Often, the accommodations can cost very little. It is about educating everyone in the workplace to realise it not the way they used to do it, but that is actually okay. Education is key in that regard.

We recently set up a community of practice with some of the leading employers in the country. We will be rolling out training with them over the course of the next number of months with a view to them beginning to employ people over the coming year. That is a project we will keep the committee updated on.

On legislation, I will raise two things that I do not have an answer on today but that may be food for thought for the committee. In many European countries, there are quotas in the private sector in respect of this area. There are no such quotas in Ireland. There are pros and cons to quotas, and they do not always mean true inclusion. At the same time, however, there comes a point where one has to ask whether, if the rate of progress is too slow, we need to think more radically. Where the State could have an instant impact and already does some work in this area, is in procurement. We have had some engagement with employers where they are looking at this area because they are seeing it is impacting procurement in public contracts. Those are two areas at both an EU and national level where more could possibly be done.

On universal design, a piece of work that might interest the committee is the ASPECTSS framework. One of the challenges with design in autism is it is not like physical access where it can be codified, rather, it is more of a framework because people are so different. That framework was developed by an Egyptian architect called Dr. Magda Mustafa. We find it is a very good basis for looking at design. Many of our school buildings, even our new ones, are not considering autistic people. They are more physically accessible but not necessarily as autism friendly.

High ceilings, common-purpose areas, and all of those sorts of spaces can cause challenges.

Discipline is a huge issue. If an autistic person goes to school and becomes really overwhelmed, begins to feel really distressed in the classroom and experiences a meltdown, a meltdown is not something that he or she has any control over. The brain has actually reached such a point that it can no longer communicate or regulate all of the information it is getting. Currently, if a person has a meltdown in the classroom and during that hour or 90 minutes throws a chair, lies on the floor or becomes distressed, the situation will very often be addressed through a code of behaviour that is the same policy that deals with the student who smokes behind the shed out the back. It does not seem remotely fair that those two things would be treated in the same way. There are times when the school placement breaks down or the person is not in the right school but it is harrowing that how we address such situations is by suspending and expelling people and by using terms like "assault", when in many cases the people being referred to would not be held criminally liable in any court in the State. They are actually treated nearly like a criminal by the education system. There is a real need to change the code of behaviour.