Fiona O'Loughlin (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that the Minister is certainly trying to put inclusivity and inclusion at the heart of all that he does. He particularly mentioned in his speech affording everybody the opportunity to develop to their full potential. That is hugely important. As we all know, education can be transformative in terms of people’s lives, particularly for people with disability.

I would like to ask about further education and lifelong learning, as opposed to that piece about going to third level. The work happening there about creating access is absolutely very important. However, there is a very large cohort of people with disabilities who will not aspire to going to third level but need to have further education. When we are talking about people’s different types of potential, there are many people among the general population who will not go on to third level but need to have another type of support through education and training that will help them in another way. It is the same for people with disabilities.

I will give the Minister some examples of the type of projects about which I am talking. The Minister and members will be familiar with the Oireachtas Work Learning, OWL, project and the graduation programme. The graduation happened the week before last. It is great that out of the ten graduates, six are getting part-time jobs.

That type of apprenticeship or internship is hugely important. To be fair to the Houses of the Oireachtas, they have got it right on this. KARE and WALK are the two organisations. I know KARE very well and back in 2016 the then CEO of KARE came to me about doing something like this. We were able to get it up and running. They also have another similar type of internship called Project SEARCH, which is run in Naas and Tallaght hospitals. It has given incredible training and opportunities to young people with disabilities, many of whom have gone on to get employment from it. It would be wonderful to see this rolled out in other parts of the State but it needs some seed funding behind it. Project SEARCH was originally brought in from the United States of America. I understand the licence to get it was quite expensive. I would love to see some work on developing a programme like that.

Reference was made to a statistic around people with a disability who leave school without the leaving certificate and there possibly being an expectation that they would go into a day service. While a day service has its function and its role, we need to look at ways of inspiring and empowering young people with disabilities to do more than they would do in day services. I will give an example of a project that is very difficult to get funding for. The chairman and committee members will have heard me speaking in the past about the Down's syndrome organisation in Kildare. This group of volunteers got together and recognised the need for extra courses in literacy for young people to keep up their literacy. They also set up a horticultural programme, which is fantastic. I put it to the Minister that it is really well worth a visit. It is located at Sallins. The young people involved in this programme grow plants and vegetables. They supply local restaurants with fruit and vegetables and they supply the local Tidy Towns group with flowers and shrubs and so on. The volunteers do an amazing job. They pay the literacy tutors and those who work in the horticultural area. Initially they were able to get funding from the HSE through KARE but then KARE was told that the HSE could not fund them any longer because this was an educational programme as opposed to health. We have spent almost one year trying to source some kind of funding to enable this project to continue, without success yet. The HSE has suggested they incorporate the organisation into a section 39. This is a group of volunteers, however, and they do not want to have to go through all of that. That should not be the way we deal with something like this. I would love to get the Minister's thoughts on how we support such groups and organisations. I get that there is a lot of focus on third level and on access to universities. The last announcement by the Minister was excellent. It is fantastic that universities are getting this funding to make it easier for people with disabilities to go to third level, but prior to this announcement I had been hoping it might be the answer to the group I am talking about and that they would be able to access a piece of the funding from education to be able to roll out the projects that really make a huge difference in the lives of young people with disabilities.

The only other question I have for the Minister is around the lack of access to assessment to enable a diagnosis of disability in order to access supports at third level. I had some experience of this at primary school and secondary school level. It is very difficult. Parents must fund that assessment themselves. In one particular case the school paid for the first assessment and the parent paid for the second assessment. The Department of Education still would not agree and it wanted a third assessment. It took four private assessments to actually get the application to where it needed to be to get the assistive technology, which thankfully the young person now has.

I have been rambling on for long enough. These are my thoughts and my concerns. I would appreciate the Minister's response.