Professor Michael Shevlin:

I thank the Chairman. I thank the committee for the invitation and I look forward to telling members a little bit about what we do. Then we will look at the implications of this for youngsters with autism and their educational progressions and transitions, which are absolutely vital, as per every other youngster, but they often experience many more difficulties in that area.

Our centre was set up in 2016. We run a level 5 programme, which is the equivalent of the leaving certificate. Our youngsters have an intellectual disability and some also have autism. There is a dual diagnosis there every so often. It is an interdisciplinary programme, and this is why we have our senior occupational therapist here today, and we have educators and employment experts. We feel this is needed to provide the wraparound support and to enable the young people to become independent learners. Their education experiences have not always been the best. They have never been seen as successes and they have often been seen as the people who are, in a sense, left behind. We hope they move into employment opportunities, and we can demonstrate this, and opportunities in further education, and make successes of those opportunities in work.

The committee can see from this slide what makes the programme work. We have been working on this for the past six years. It is very much about having a structured college programme, as I have described, which has real ambition for the young people to ensure they become competent and independent learners. It is centred around the graduate, so it is very much people centred, which is based again on occupational therapy insights. It is also linked in with families, and we also have a business partner network, which members will hear more about later. The programme is about the combination of a university education with the business community, how those relationships are developed, and how they are fostered in this way.

In the second half of the second year our students do a work placement programme. They are supported in this employment and in different experiences to enable them to move on to a graduate internship. When the students finish their two years, they generally do a six-month paid internship and the committee will hear a little bit more about this later. The aim is to develop key employment skills. From surveying a lot of programmes that were designed to ensure people would be work ready, we realised that often the person missing from all of it was the young person. Our programmes are very much structured around how the young people see themselves, see their world, how they experience their world, and then to develop the skills, self-determination and decision-making that will actually help them in employment. That is the whole thing.

I turn now to what we provide. The idea is that the mentors for the young people are from within the business. We do not employ job coaches, which is the traditional model of supported employment, because we want it to be fully embedded within the business. We have online mentor training, and we have multiple meetings between Ms Ringwood, our senior occupational therapist, Ms Devitt, our employment pathways co-ordinator, and the HR team within the businesses. A skills profile is developed with the young person so that the people in the business community know what the young person is capable of. We encourage great ambition for the young people. There is ongoing support but the reality is the young people themselves are given meaningful tasks. It is real work. It is not tokenistic.

The business then provides a dedicated mentor who is like a buddy. He or she is not the team leader. There is management support for the process. There is HR support, which is vital. The team the young person is on is also supported. This is what we aim for. As members will see from the presentation, there is the TCPID team, the manager in the business, the mentee, and the mentor. It is very much a tripartite relationship. It is built and developed. A whole relationship of trust develops. If some issue happens that often appears to be insurmountable, sometimes people are not comfortable saying that something is going wrong, but we encourage that level of openness because that is the way we can really engage. Often it is just about a different perception of how the young person sees the world, or maybe his or her communication strategies are not necessarily what are expected within the workplace. We can solve that. It is not usually a major issue. We have never had to cut short an internship. Quite a few of the young people have ended up with permanent roles, either within the company they have worked with or with another company because the young person has developed the requisite skills. We now have four young people on internships in Trinity College. We see this as a very positive development.

I will now hand over to Mr. MacNeill to talk about the business partners and that element.