The project U4INCLUSION aims to contribute to the labour inclusion of students with intellectual disabilities with the delivery of a common curriculum to be implemented at higher education. Thus, based on partners previous experience at the national level, they will design together with a standardized training itinerary that can be susceptible to European homologation with the corresponding educational materials, and methodology. The final aim is to improve the employment rates of people with intellectual disabilities enabling them to be integrated into the labour market to ensure their full social inclusion. Along the project lifecycle, partners will organize 4 transnational meetings to monitor the project performance: 2 intellectual outputs, 2 learning activities, and 4 multiplier event to disseminate the project outputs and raise the awareness of companies and other detected target groups of the benefits of hiring skilled people with intellectual disabilities. The activities planned will engage: - 20 professionals participating in one of the learning activities; - 30 students with intellectual disabilities between 18 and 30 years old participating in one of the learning activities; - 10 accompanying persons for the 30 students mentioned above. - 50 participants in each multiplier event held in the consortium countries. The main goal of this event is to disseminate the Os at the international level and to share with participants the results of the project and experiences. The expected impact on the target groups are: Students with intellectual disabilities: improve their labour inclusion skills, opportunities and social inclusion, and increase their language and digital competences and EU citizenship. Professionals delivering training to people with intellectual disabilities: improve their skills with a dedicated itinerary for students with intellectual disabilities; increase their language competences and EU citizenship; reduce their burden; and increase the labour opportunities. Companies: better knowledge of training programmes dedicated to improving the labour skills of young people with intellectual disabilities; increase their awareness about the benefits of hiring this group.
Conscious of the added value of European cooperation, we wished, in the first place, to achieve mutual exchange and learn from the good practices of each other. We applied this methodology to obtain the main goal ot our project, which was the design of a common training itinerary specifically addressed to persons with intellectual disabilities to improve their employability, that could be implemented by higher education institutions and recognized by the European Union. To achieve this goal, it seemed necessary to start by carrying out a study on the present situation of education and employment of persons with intellectual disabilities in Europe, specially in the countries where the partner entities are located. And the common curriculum had to be accompanied by the necessary tools to implement it: methodological orientations and learning materials. Our project, providing the basic tools to develop a training program for persons with intellectual disabilities at higher education level had to facilitate the extension of these programs to new Universities and new countries, and therefore contribute to employability of persons with intellectual disabilities.
We applied for this project conscious of the need of improving employability of persons with intellectual disabilities, who have an employment rate which is much lower than that of persons without disabilities. One of the key actions to promote employability is, of course, the improvement of training and education. The experiences that some of the partner entities (Miguel Hernández University, Tomas More Kempen University of Applied Sciences, Institut für Inklusive Bildung) had already set up in the last years taught us that the development of training programs for persons with intellectual disabilities by higher education institutions contributes in a decisive way to improve their social and adaptive skills and strongly enhances their chances of getting an employment. However, in most countries of the European Union, training programs for persons with intellectual disabilities are either completely unknown –this is the case of Italy- or are marginal and isolated experiences implemented by a very scarce number of Universities. This is the background of our project, the ultimate aim of which is to improve employment rate of persons with intellectual disabilities and thus foster their social inclusion.