Sir, –Among the accepted recommendations in the revised Education for Persons with Special Educational Needs Act is to address the anomaly of an upper-age limit in special schools, while none exists in mainstream second-level schools. It may interest people to know that, since the inception of the transition year programme more than 40 years ago, no young person in any special school has participated in an equivalent transition year to their peers. They are precluded from the option to engage in this programme because of their attendance in our wonderful special schools. Think about that for a minute. This has implications for their future employability and participation in society. Ireland has one of the lowest employment rates for people with intellectual disability in Europe. Along with that comes a sense of a lack of purpose, a lack of agency, a lack of being valued that has in my opinion, far reaching psychological impact. .There have admittedly been some improvements made and some supports are being rolled out with the recently announced comprehensive employment strategy (CES) transitions programme, but this is not the same thing as a transition year. It needs to be part of the tapestry of options available for lifelong learning for all. In reality, the lives of current and past children with disabilities in special schools continue with a myriad of small and big barriers to real inclusion, as Lucinda Murrihy recounted recently on these pages. TY non-participation is just another one of them. As a parent of a young person with complex disabilities, I understand this all too well. The net effect is that our children in special schools leave school a year earlier than their peers in mainstream secondary schools. As of 2024, over 80 per cent and rising of all our teenagers engage with transition year. Ours don’t - they are left out of “the societal architecture of a mature republic,” as Nessa Hill, CEO, Neurodiversity Ireland put it in a letter to this newspaper earlier this week.We must do better. Don’t forget the humans. – Yours, etc,Caroline Farrell,Marino Dublin 3