Mr. Aaron Mullaniff:

I will take the first questions. As to the data, we are working off the national access plan. We are looking at 233 students we know have blindness or vision impairment. Again, I should probably caveat that with the fact they have indicated to access officers that they have vision impairment or blindness. It is not always the case that students will actually declare, and that can sometimes be counter-productive. I also acknowledge that not every further education institution has an access officer who is working on a full-time basis and we might find there is one access officer covering multiple needs.

The figure is quite frightening when it comes to employment and the prospects are quite low. We talk about one in four, so 75% of blind or vision impaired people are not participating or are out of the labour force. When we strip it back to how many are in employment - we use the census for this data - we are looking at between 16% and 18%, which is frighteningly low. We are very conscious of that as an organisation. In the opening statement, we mentioned how we have had to pivot the entire organisation and all the services in the organisation around need. We have the children and young persons team looking at early intervention and transitions, and we now have an employment team.

I like the Senator’s Ballyfermot example and some great graduates have been produced from that programme. We have had to go out and create our own college, and that college is looking at employment skills. We have interpreted it at QQI framework level V and I think we are one of the first organisations to do this. That is looking at the concepts or indicators of employability, such as self-advocacy and digital skills. We are also looking at the opportunity to get involved and to carry out mock interviews with employers and our workplace partners, and that has been going very well.

On that point, NCBI got 46 blind and vision impaired people into employment last year and we saved some 140 jobs as well. Again, this is not the responsibility of the national sight loss agency but we have had to step into a space where we have become the solutions provider, and we have been quite successful at that piece.

In regard to how we generally try to ensure there is equality around opportunity for children across education, Ms O'Dwyer might speak on what we need to do more of.