Ms Jodie McGriele:

Within the national employment team approximately 75% of our referrals relate to retention, which is people staying in their jobs. We prioritise those people. We see those as our high-priority factors because we want to keep those people in their jobs and we want to work with the employers. We have a team of national employment advisers who are also occupational therapists, OTs, functional vision assessors. We assist with functional vision assessments so we can get a clear level of what the person can see or how their sight has changed. We provide orientation, mobility and access to the built environ if that is an issue. We can provide a workplace audit. We can work with the employer around accommodation and have a look at that task analysis of the job role, what needs a tweak to keep the person in a job and whether there is any other role the person might be able to fulfil. I completely understand, in terms of remote working, that it has given a bit of a level playing field in that it has taken away the barrier of accessing the built environ or that orientation or route training that person might have to undertake physically to get into work. However, we do not want people to lose out on engaging in a workforce and having that social interaction with people.

During Covid, some of our blind or vision impaired service users who were in work found that, due to firewalls, their assistive technologies sometimes did not work when they were at home. Rather than trying to fix the problem, their employers told them to choose training they wanted to do for the next six months. That is devaluing for the individual.

Employing someone with low vision or no vision on a work experience or internship basis comes down to each business's confidence. We often receive phone calls from people who, after taking on transition year students, suddenly realise the students have no vision and wonder what they should do. It is a question of working hand in hand on education.

We find that, for a number of reasons, our transition year students are at a disadvantage when entering the labour market. In secondary education, there is a lack of what we call the expanded core curriculum, namely, independent living skills, compensatory skills, etc. Our blind or vision-impaired students often need a bit of extra training in that respect to become independent if they are leaving for university, further education or employment.

If we can secure some funding, we hope to open a barista-style coffee dock in the entrance of the Wayfinding Centre to serve visitors. We hope we can use it as a source of work experience and paid internships for people with disabilities and provide them with barista-style training, with vision rehab or another type of rehab, thereby giving them opportunities they might not have had with their sighted peers.