Ms Toni O'Dwyer:

I thank the Deputy for her question. To know what inclusive and accessible education looks like, we need to understand the issues. I will outline them briefly.

Access to a curriculum for a child who cannot do it through vision means access to books in an alternative format. It has been the reality for years that children who require books in an alternative format can wait months or even years for them. We have recent examples of students who received books once they had finished the cycle – someone received in transition year his books that should have been available for his junior cycle. This means he received his books three years late. I do not know of any other cohort of children in education that wait months or years to get the books that they rely on to access their education.

The other strand is accessing class materials. Education has changed considerably in recent years, with many teachers now relying on handouts in class. The experience of the students we deal with is that these handouts are frequently in inaccessible formats. It is not a big job or rocket science to make a handout accessible. Instead of taking a picture of the board or a screen, a teacher could send it in a Word document. This is how simply access can be achieved, yet children have to go into school and advocate for themselves in this regard day in and day out. The social and educational cost of that for children is extremely high.

Access to the board is a significant issue. Children do not like those pieces of technology that make them stand out as being different. What they want is access to mainstream technologies. There are straightforward solutions, for example screen sharing, that can give children access without making them stand out as being different. These solutions make technology more acceptable to students with vision impairments.

The last point I will make on inclusive and accessible education is about timetabling. Due to issues with timetabling, many children get their additional resources on subjects that are not their primary ones or their greatest needs in order to fit into timetables that are already chock-a-block with all the additional pieces that students with vision impairment require.

Those are all the-----