Mr. Adam Harris:

There is a lot of territory to cover in that. First, I recognise that we have seen an enormous increase in the number of autism classes in recent years. We welcome that. However, we are concerned that the shift has taken place in the context of a significantly higher rate of diagnosis. Therefore, while we have seen an increase of almost 1,000%, at the same time we have moved from a situation where in 2017 the Department of Education was talking about one in 65 students at school to there being one in 27. The demographic shift has caused a huge challenge.

The most important thing is outcomes. When autism classes were first proposed, the concept was that they would be a vehicle to enable people to fully participate in school life, but too often we are still seeing schools within schools, autism classes being staffed by people who do not have appropriate training and people who enter autism classes at age four never getting the opportunity to meaningfully integrate before they finish at 18. In itself, that causes barriers as people transition to adulthood. We need a much sharper focus on outcomes and not only on access. That is something we are hearing increasingly often from families.

AsIAm has a dedicated team working on adult support and employment nationally. At present, approximately 1,000 adults are accessing group-based support programmes run by AsIAm. That includes post-diagnosis support, well-being support and social support programmes. Our employment team takes an approach of building capacity within mainstream employment environments and HR teams so they can meaningfully recruit from our community. The work we are doing in that area has significantly accelerated since January and we have supported more than 100 people into employment since the start of the year. However, we know we are only reaching the tip of the iceberg as 85% of autistic people are thought to be unemployed or underemployed and that will be a huge challenge demographically as we see more people age out of school in the coming years.

Thinking about what we need to do to better prepare young people, the research shows that if people have access to the workplace and workplace experiences when still in education, their chance of being unemployed later significantly decreases. The reality is that our families often have to fight tooth and nail to be able to get a student support plan.

I will set out the reality of where we need to be as a country in this regard. In addition to planning for the supports that somebody has within school, from the time that person enters their early teenage years we should be planning for their transition into adulthood and building up the skills they need in terms of accessing the workplace and identifying their strengths and support needs. The significant shift we need to see must involve a much better integration between education and life after school. It remains a concern to us that there is an automatic presumption that many autistic people will access day services as opposed to a sense that they should be supported to have access to the workplace. We need to be much more ambitious in that regard. This does not mean every autistic person working full time; it means every autistic person having the opportunity to contribute in line with their support needs and the number of hours they can work in the week. That is important from a well-being and participation point of view.

I want to make Senator O'Loughlin aware that we are piloting a new model of support called a one-stop shop that comes from Scotland. This is a community hub where autistic children and adults can drop in and access issue-based support and the suite of well-being and social supports I referred to that we run nationally. The Senator will be glad to hear that one of our two pilot sites will cover south Dublin, Kildare and west Wicklow and we hope to open it by January. We will be sure to invite the Senator to it when the opportunity comes.