Ms Roisin Doherty:

I am very familiar with the further education element, and that is what I particularly want to focus on but I will come back to the other two questions.

The specialist training providers were mentioned. I just checked it there, and the budget for 2023 was €40 million. The Deputy touched on a really core aspect when asking whether there is enough awareness of it and whether there could be more provision. We find that many young learners want to be involved in a fully inclusive education system. They do not want to be segregated; they want to be in the mainstream, as such. We are working with the ETBs to try and integrate that specialist training provision into the core of further education, so that it is not a separate provision as such. We find that then that we have learners who are perhaps more keen to go into the mainstream, but at all times where there is a particular need, people would avail of specialist training providers. I would encourage anybody, if they are accessing further education, to contact the adult education guidance officers. There are 240 in the country, and they can provide one-to-one guidance as to what particular course suits your particular needs at a particular time. It is to try and get that holistic approach as opposed to segregating people into the system.

The Deputy mentioned demand for places. On what we are trying to do, for example, we worked in quite a lot of detail with regard to the adult literary service at one point. We found that people were accessing the adult literary service for ten to 15 years on an ongoing basis. What we are trying to do is to stop that flow and put in interventions early in people's lives whereby they get access to further education at an early stage and progress to employment, as opposed to having to be supported in the long term. That is why we worked with Down Syndrome Ireland this year, where we are trying to get young people into employment early on. We found in the north east that employers are actually looking for people who have accessed the adult literary service. They turn up every day. They are there all the time and they are very motivated. We are trying to make inroads into those approaches such that rather than looking at individual programmes, we look at the holistic approach. That seems to be working really well.

We have a number of programmes that are progressing people into work through Down Syndrome Ireland, and we find that works. We are also working with the head by trying to get universal design into all our programmes. We are moving from the approach where it is a deficit model to a strengths-based one, where your supports can be integrated as much as possible into the provision, and you have your own agency as opposed to having to ask for extra services. Where possible, services are integrated. That does not mean there are not individualised supports as well.

As the Deputy can see, our role is very much looking at further education. However, I am aware that the Deputy mentioned other questions, and if she does not mind, I will come back to her with some written information on those.