Ms Rachel Cassen:

The attitude of schools is the biggest barrier, as is the belief, which nobody is ever going to admit so it is a very difficult thing to challenge, that children with disabilities should be in a separate setting. For example, we have spent a lot of time with an organisation called Inclusion Alberta, in Canada, which set up what is called "Inclusive Post-Secondary Education". Some 80% of students achieving an inclusive post-secondary education go on to open employment. The question for me is always what we are educating our children for, and this even links into the cost-of-disability payment. Part of the thinking about that payment comes out of an idea that people with disabilities are jobless and that jobless is their lot. We need to have far greater ambition for young people with disabilities today to think they will work.

Another project we work with in Washington State, not Washington DC, called the Rise Project, has 80% of people with disabilities in open employment. The reason is that it decided this was possible and set its expectations very high. It provided the right types of supports and included people with what is often described as "challenging behaviour". The project has managed to place them and has looked at the conditions of success in the person showing up well, in the right environment, with the right supports. Again, I encourage us all to think differently about what we are looking at and talking about when we discuss disability. People are going to be poor if they spend their whole lives not working. Let us get them working.

With the massive rise of AI, we need to get on top of this in terms of the impact of AI on the employment of people with disabilities. Many entry level jobs are being wiped out. Many new jobs will come in but, as yet, we do not know what they are. AI is going to change things for people with disabilities seeking work because some of the jobs that, traditionally, they might have sought are gone.