Stakeholder feedback highlighted the need to collect information from both children and adults, as well as participation in both formal and informal education. Informal education might include life-long learning and work-related training. Information on the type of informal training will be collected. Participation will be restricted to a certain time period to ensure relevance and to minimise issues with recall.
For respondents who are not currently in education or have not participated in education recently, they will be asked if they would like to attend and what barriers might prevent their participation. In the 2006 survey, respondents were asked directly if they had left education sooner than desired due to their disability, and this topic will be retained but might be refined during the design phase.
Information on barriers within education, required supports or unmet needs for supports, and school type (mainstream or specialised) will also be collected. There was an interest to measure school belonging or connectedness for children, and this concept will be explored during the design phase.
There was interest to collect information on transition points for young people. There were also requests for information on a desire to attend third level education after secondary school and what barriers are discouraging young people from wanting to attend further education.
Highest level of education will be added from the Census of Population.
Some administrative data will be added to supplement the education module. School absences over a threshold of 20 days, and the reason for the reported absence will be added via administrative sources.
There was interest in collecting data on barriers to lifelong learning and enabling factors to further education. These topics were considered to overlap with the in-scope topics outlined above. There was also a suggestion to collect specific reasons why a respondent left education early, whether the respondent requires additional supports outside of school, the level of education when functional difficulties or disability started, and reason for wanting to participate in education. These topics ranked lower than topics retained and ultimately were deprioritised to ensure the module isn’t overly burdensome.
Other topics which would lend themselves better to other research methods include topics on invisible disabilities and the related challenges or barriers within education. Data on awareness or update of social inclusion programmes such as Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme (SICAP) or Community Services Programmes (CSP) were deprioritised as the numbers for these would be too small to get meaningful data from.