Ms Julie Tonge:

I thank the Deputy for his compliments. Our biggest issue is definitely time. Students land on our doorstep and need support perhaps to get to lectures, to UCD on the bus or whatever it might be. The lectures will have started and the students might already have two assignments to complete, and they might have to try to take out books from the library but not know how to do that. Time is against us and that makes for a stressful introduction to higher education for some students. This applies not just to students with autism but they, in particular, struggle with that transition, as we have said all along. We would love to work with the transition services that exist but also to take a more holistic approach-----