More than a hundred professors and students from Spanish universities and from the associative movement of people with disabilities who participate in Fundación ONCE’s UniDiversity program will meet on Tuesday in Madrid to analyze the challenges and opportunities that the incorporation of people with disabilities entails intellectual to the university world.
It will be in a day that will take place at the ONCE Educational Resources Center in Madrid, located at Avenida Doctor García Tapia, 210, between 10:00 and 17:00.
The inauguration of the meeting is expected to have the presence of José Manuel Pingarrón, Secretary General of Universities; José Carlos Gómez, president of CRUE-Spanish Universities; Alberto Durán, Executive Vice President of the ONCE Foundation; Rosa Díaz, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Pablo Olavide University of Seville and spokesperson for the academic directorates of the programs; Almudena Puelma, student at the University of Jaén and student representative; and Rocío Camacho, Meliá Spain Corporate HR Manager.
UniDiversity is a program promoted by Fundación ONCE with the support of the European Social Fund, through which nearly nine hundred students with intellectual disabilities enrolled in the National Youth Guarantee System have already passed.
It began in the 2017-2018 academic year and 15 Spanish universities participated in it, eight fewer than in the current call, when the total number of students enrolled is expected to reach 350.
The main objective of this program is to involve universities
The main objective of this program is to involve universities, as decisive agents in social inclusion, in the training of young people with intellectual disabilities, whose access to higher education is still insignificant.
Currently there are no statistical data on people with intellectual disabilities in higher education and their presence is limited to isolated cases. Globally, people with disabilities are only represented by 1.7% in undergraduate university studies and the percentage is even lower when we talk about master’s, postgraduate or doctoral students.
Only between 5 and 6% of people with disabilities have university studies today in Spain, despite the fact that the European Strategy 2020 speaks of a horizon of 40%.
The universities participating in this initiative include in their training programs an internship period on campus or in ordinary external companies. These internships are proposed in the supported employment modality, for which students have job coaches.
At the end of the first two editions, a total of 60 of the 551 participants were hired by the entities or companies in which they did their internships.
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