Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his question. I welcome his appointment to the Joint Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. We are for looking forward to working with him on that committee.

Inclusion is one of the core strategic goals for our Department. Our ambition is to ensure that we provide support and opportunities to persons with special and additional needs. On the higher education side, I am pleased to say that the target set in the National Plan for Equity of Access to Higher Education 2015-2019 in the context of increasing participation in higher education for people with disabilities was not only met but was exceeded. Specific targets to increase participation in higher education by students with a physical or sensory disability were also met. In fact, they actually revised the targets and increased the level of ambition. I also want to be honest because I sometimes think that when targets are met, I am little bit suspicious because they can sometimes be set too low. If one sets targets, exceeds them and then exceeds the new targets, one wonders if those targets are ambitious enough.

I am very proud of the work that our sector and our country have done in respect of inclusion, but I also know that when one looks behind the headline figures, that there are certain areas that were not being measured. We were not measuring, for example, participation of students with intellectual disabilities. The plan was silent in respect of autism. These are two areas we have moved on in the past couple of weeks together as the Deputy will know and we have announced a new funding stream. In the first instance, €3 million has been allocated to all the colleges to develop universal designs and initiatives that support autistic students. This could be sensory rooms, wayfinding apps or new ways of teaching.

In the second and very exciting initiative, which will kick-off in 12 months' time, we have now had a call-out to all of the universities to ask them to design and come up with programmes for people with intellectual disabilities. As a Government, we have committed €3 million a year for the next four years to the programme. That will give us more projects like the Trinity Centre for People with Intellectual Disabilities, which has been a roaring success, but also to have more projects around the country.

The national access plan is almost finalised. I signed off on it just yesterday. I will be bringing it to Cabinet probably at the end of this month and will publish it in August. We will be looking at a number of new areas, at people who have had experience in the care system, at more supports for people parenting singly or on their own, and we will not just be measuring access but will be measuring outcome. That is, not just that you get in the door, but what actually happened when you got in the door and how did you succeed?

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