“What do you want to do when you finish school?” It’s a question every young person must answer – a very large decision for an 18-year-old to make. For young adults with complex needs, or multiple disabilities, it is a massive decision, albeit one that sometimes doesn’t feel like a choice at all. And that needs to change.
Our recent research study on the post-school pathways of young people with additional needs found a lot to celebrate in how the Irish system prepares school-leavers for adult life and the transition into post-school education. Focusing on students who need the most support, the co-operation between special schools and HSE staff to develop a rich profile of each young person and find a placement suited to their wants and needs worked well for many of our participants.
The evidence showed a growing recognition that support to successfully transition from special education to mainstream further education, training and employment needs to begin well before leaving school, although perhaps not enough recognition that it needs to remain in place well after leaving school.
These young adults can increasingly avail of a broad range of high-quality postsecondary educational opportunities, from programmes within higher education or further education settings to specialised pathways such as the National Learning Network to individual centres in their local area.
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More importantly, there is growing attention to linkages between these pathways, so that where students start off doesn’t restrict where they can end up. In short, through hard work by schools, post-school settings and Government bodies across health and education, as well as tireless advocacy by disabled people and parents, the educational offerings available to this cohort have come a long way even in the two decades since today’s school-leavers were born.
Looking forward, the research highlights key areas for improvement, minor and major changes we would like to see.
Firstly, supports such as transport can be the difference between a young person participating and thriving in a post-school pathway and them being unable to engage. Something so simple has a huge impact. Students in special schools receive this support throughout their time in school, and there are strong arguments for extending it to cover their next step as well. Leaving school means leaving a caring community and a familiar routine, it shouldn’t mean losing one’s ability to leave the house as well. Yet for some participants in our study, this was what it meant not to have transport to and from their post-school setting.
For other participants, settings were unable to provide all of the hours they were allocated in the HSE profiling process, most often due to staffing issues. As in other areas of the care sector, many day services face difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff. The negative impact of understaffing and high turnover on the experiences of young adults attending day services was clear. We believe there is an urgent need for a comprehensive workforce plan for the sector to tackle these issues.
On a deeper level, the research has left us with questions about what a pathway or trajectory for young people with complex needs should look like in the medium term.
In school, students work their way through tailored versions of the mainstream curricula such as the junior cycle level one and two programmes and modified forms of the Leaving Certificate Applied as appropriate, while also working on practical life skills. After school, the sense of progression can be lost, as young people enter a setting where they will remain for many years, or participate in a series of courses that do not build from one to the next towards a future goal. One participant in the research memorably described their child’s wall as papered in certificates from completed courses, but with no real progress to show for it.
While our study did not look at outcomes from post-school pathways, many participants highlighted their concern that there was nowhere to go. In special schools, staff talked about the difficulty of organising work experience and their worries about how prepared students would be for the world of employment.
Other ESRI research has shown that Ireland has the lowest employment rate for disabled people in Europe. For this specific cohort, there is a lack of sheltered employment, with supports tailored for these young people’s abilities and needs.
In many ways it is easier to design and run tailored educational programmes than tailored employment programmes, but the success of these programmes in engaging young people who could not have participated in post-school education 20 years ago shows what can be accomplished with work and resourcing.
It is a shame for them not to be able to progress. Their skills are useful. True inclusion is not just having education opportunities, it also means funnelling these students into jobs. We all want to feel useful. We all have a right to feel useful. And these students have so much to offer the workforce. So how do we make this happen?
Successful employment programmes will require communication and co-operation between educational settings and employers, as well as between the various departments with a stake in the matter: education, health, employment and social protection, at least. Wraparound supports that take a young person through education and on to the next step could be transformational in ensuring that a young person is on a trajectory rather than treading water.
These challenges will not be new to anyone familiar with the sector – parents and other advocates have been fighting for many of them for years. The sense of waging an endless struggle to access necessary supports was common to many of our participants. The mental and emotional toll of this struggle can be huge. We must ask ourselves is this the kind of life a developed, thriving country such as Ireland wants to provide to some of its most vulnerable citizens?
Dr Eamonn Carroll is a former ESRI postdoctoral research fellow and Professor Selina McCoy is the ESRI’s head of education research
