Ms Roisin Doherty:

I will deal with Deputy Murnane O'Connor's questions first. I do not have the specific information on Carlow and Kilkenny, but I will certainly get the information to her. I think that was one of the first areas we were involved in. I will certainly get the Deputy a full report. The idea is that the two persons who are being supported by SOLAS through Down Syndrome Ireland would have visited all ETBs to provide them with training and do it on a calm basis.

One of my colleagues earlier mentioned moving away the medicalised model to a socially inclusive model. I will certainly get the Deputy information on that. The only requirement we had when we were funding that resource was that it had to be in mainstream provision. It must be in that environment of mainstreaming. We do not really want to fund it as segregated. As long as it is mainstream, we do not really mind what it is. I will certainly get the Deputy information on that. It started with looking at literacy programmes. We are slowly trying to change the system. We have the Latch-On programme which Down Syndrome Ireland wanted to be run for its literacy services. That has now moved on to the other programmes I mentioned allowing people to progress into further education and progress and get on with their lives without having to access ten or 20 years. They will get lifelong learning as they go along, but they have a pathway to take them wherever they want to go.

The Deputy also mentioned apprenticeships and asked how they can be more inclusive. We work with the OECD under the report that the NDA had funded about how to make the whole of education and all services more inclusive. They agreed with our feedback to have inclusive environments put in place as opposed to the measurement of the number of people with a disability.

Colleagues mentioned that. It is about moving away from the criteria in which you need somebody to medicalise their need for support and trying to in-build the supports. For example, what we are trying to do in the case of dyslexia, for which a significant number of learners would require support, is to build assistive technology into the system. It is about having that flexibility so that we can move towards building implicitness through universal design through all our services. That means, in due course, there should be fewer people labelising as having particular disability support needs. That is what we would like to influence today. When we move to that system, we are nearly signing ourselves up to look as though we have underachieved. Last year, there were so many people with disabilities called and this year, there are 1,000 fewer but perhaps that is because those people did not need to put up their hands and look for particular supports. That is the broader picture.

There is the access and inclusion work group under the National Apprenticeship Office. All the stakeholders with regard to inclusion and access are in that group. It is working on a work plan. There is a bursary of €3,000 in that particular programme. It is providing reasonable accommodations and supports for apprentices in the system.