Ms Siobhán McKenna:

On the question of targets and quotas, Ms McCabe mentioned that PAS has targets in its strategy. I would love to see people have targets that would drive this kind of work in their organisations. We do not set policy for the rest of the Civil Service in that space; that is the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform. That Department is focused on disability inclusion this year.

We used to have confined competitions for people with disabilities. We do not do them any more. I am not entirely sure why. My concern about those competitions is the backlash against people whereby it is perceived that they somehow had an easier ride in. I would much rather see us make our processes and policies much more inclusive, which will support people with disabilities as they come through our processes and go on further through the Civil Service in various guises. We had an engagement strategy across the whole Civil Service of approximately 45,000 people just before Christmas. As I understand it, about 12% of people identified as having a disability in that engagement. That is three or four times higher than the number who declare coming in to the Civil Service. We only do about one third of the recruitment so not everybody comes through our processes. Our data is only reflective of the competitions we do.

We are allowed to take positive action under equality legislation. I do not think affirmative action and more quotas are currently permitted under legislation. That does not mean it should not change. The current situation we are in, however, is that it is more about that positive action approach. We do things such as interview clinics and application clinics for under-represented groups to demystify the whole Civil Service process, which is quite a mystery unless you are in it. We get very good and positive feedback from that.

On the programmes we have, we had an 80% success rate for the WAM programme for supporting graduates into permanent roles. They got to do a ten-month internship to acclimatise themselves to the service and the type of tasks. They had two in-work assessments because the best predictor of whether someone can do a job is if he or she is actually doing it. Once they successfully come through that, they get to compete to the same standard that everybody else does for an executive officer or clerical officer role and if they are successful, they stay in the role they are in.

It is more about finding different ways into the service for people with disabilities. Not everybody will nail it in a 45-minute interview or an online assessment test. It is about how we find methods of attracting people with the skills we need and testing their skills in slightly different ways. The challenge then is how we scale those up and roll them out across other Departments.