Dr. Rosalyn Tamming:

The specialist disability services action plan is being implemented by the Department of Children, Disability and Equality. On the steering groups that I sit on, there are the issues of the emergencies, such as the parent dies or the parent goes into hospital and what happens. There is a huge recognition that there is a whole planning piece that needs to be in place. The system is reactionary rather preventive. There is acknowledgement that it needs to be more preventive. We need to be looking at what is going to happen and have things set up. There is not that funding going into that at the moment. However, there is a push for more funding to go into that planning piece in order that people are prepared and if the route after a parent dies is to residential service or some sort of supportive living, that it is set up in advance.

Coming back to the topic of employment, yesterday I was at the launch of preliminary findings from a review of the WALK PEER programme. This is a programme where a NGO, WALK, supports school leavers into employment or further training. The results were positive. It is deferring people from day places. These are people from special schools whose trajectory used to be always to go into a HSE-funded day service place, but now there are alternatives. The HSE has allowed a deferral now for five years. It used to be that a person takes their place or they will never get it again. There are many options out there now. There are lots of pockets of great practice but they are funded on a short-term basis. They cannot plan. They lose good staff then until the next round of funding comes. As Dr. Hartney said, if it is a national programme of supported employment that means that there is equitable access for everybody. It is throughout the country. It not just these pockets. We can bring in all that learning. There is a lot that can be done.