Welcome to INHEF Special Feature
Des Aston
National & Schools Coordinator, Trinity Centre for People with Intellectual Disabilities (TCPID), School of Education, Trinity College Dublin
About the Author
Des Aston
National & Schools Coordinator, Trinity Centre for People with Intellectual Disabilities (TCPID), School of Education, Trinity College Dublin
Des Aston is the National & Schools Coordinator at the Trinity Centre for People with Intellectual Disabilities (TCPID), School of Education, Trinity College Dublin. His research interests are inclusive education, post-school transitions to education and employment opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities. Through his professional role with TCPID, he has established and is the current Chairperson of the Inclusive National Higher Education Forum (INHEF).
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Barbara Waters
Journal Editor, AHEAD
Barbara Waters is the Project Lead on the Reasonable Accommodations, Professional Placements (RAPP) Project, Barbara was Chief Executive of Skill: National Bureau for Students with Disabilities, UK. 1996- 2010. Barbara represented Skill nationally on policy issues in education and disability related to post 16 education, training and employment.
Since 2010 Barbara has worked as a researcher on further and higher education and disability. She was part of the LINK European network concerned with disabled students in higher education and has undertaken research on competence standards and learning outcomes in higher education for the Equality Challenge Unit, UK, published in 2015, looking particularly at Nursing, Teaching, Foreign Languages and STEM subjects. She was the evaluator of the Erasmus + programme on Universal Design for Learning completed in October 2016, and rapporteur for AHEAD Ireland in the MappED access programme with the Erasmus Student Network in 2017. Barbara is co-author of the AHEAD publication 'Students with Disabilities on Placement - Guidance on the Provision of Reasonable Accommodations on Practice-based Placements in Professionally Accredited Programmes' 2022.
She is currently the editor of the peer-to-peer Journal for AHEAD Ireland. She has an MA in Business and Public Sector Strategy and received an honorary doctorate from the Open University, UK.
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AHEAD is pleased to collaborate with the Inclusive National Higher Education Forum (INHEF) on this special feature of the AHEAD Journal, bringing together eight contributions that reflect the evolving landscape of inclusive higher education in Ireland for students with intellectual disabilities. As national policy increasingly prioritises widening participation, including through initiatives under the National Access Plan such as Path 4, Phase 2, higher education is being called to examine not only who gains access, but how that access is conceptualised and sustained.
Inclusive higher education challenges long-held assumptions about meritocracy within the academy. Too often, participation is framed as dependent on individual capacity or readiness, rather than on the structures, systems and cultures that determine who is recognised as belonging. For students with intellectual disabilities, the most significant barriers have historically been systemic rather than personal: inflexible accreditation frameworks, narrow definitions of progression, and funding models that position inclusion as peripheral rather than core.
Established in 2018, INHEF emerged as a national response to limited visibility and fragmented provision across the sector. Since then, it has grown into a collaborative forum committed to reshaping policy, practice and provision.
The articles in this edition illustrate both the creativity and the critical reflection that underpin this work. Collectively, they invite us to reconsider what higher education values, who it is designed for, and what it will take to ensure that inclusion is not an aspiration, but a structural reality.
DES ASTON, INHEF Chair; TCPID, School of Education, Trinity College Dublin
BARBARA WATERS, Editor, AHEAD Journal
