Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Senator is right about funding for staff and student training around awareness. The committee identified it as an area that needs real acceleration. From September, under the funding I referred to earlier, PATH 4, every college in Ireland will get an allocation for universal design. It is up to them what they do with it because they are autonomous. There is a list of things they can spend it on and one is staff training. There is a funding stream under PATH 4 for staff training and for student awareness, because that is also valid.

We have put a digital badge in place for staff who have accessed training on universal design. I will provide the committee with figures on how many have been through that. There is a programme and at the end staff are provided with a digital badge that allows them to say they have done the training. It is credited. There is also the funding with PATH 4.

I have been given a note here that says in 2021, 771 staff across the third level sector were awarded the universal design for learning, UDL, badge and 138 participants were awarded the optional facilitators badge. I will send the committee a note on these programmes. I think it is a really good initiative. It was co-designed by the Association for Higher Education Access and Disability, AHEAD, and by the UCD access and lifelong learning team. That seems to be going well. Funding and providing the bandwidth and opportunity for staff was a recognised need.

The Senator raised daycare centres and residential placements and how they interact with the education system. If I am really honest, it is something we have not cracked as a country and that is wrong. There are a couple of things we are doing on this. We have started engaging with a number of organisations. For example, I met recently with the Blue Diamond Drama Academy which is an amazing drama school for people with disabilities. It is an utterly inspiring place to visit. We are looking at how we can plug them in with the local ETB so that it is not operating as an island separate to the education system. Not to stray outside my brief, but part of the answer is the personalised budgets that colleagues in the Department of Health, the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte and others are passionate about because, to be blunt, sometimes a lot of funding is provided to organisations, and it is not to say they do not do good work, but empowering the individual to decide how to spend it is a really important step forward. There are some examples of individualised budgets. That would enable citizens to say they want to do a certain course, or to go to Blue Diamond or to Lakers which I know in my constituency. There is joined-up work to be done there and the personalised budgets could be a way of progressing it.