Enhancing Employment Opportunities and Training for Individuals with Autism and Intellectual Disability

132 Mr Shawn Huang Wei Zhong asked the Minister for Social and Family Development (a) what are the Ministry's efforts to enhance employment opportunities and employability of individuals with autism and intellectual disability; and (b) what are the Ministry's plans to enhance continuing training support for these individuals.

Mr Masagos Zulkifli B M M: To help persons with disabilities gain employment, the Government supports employers of persons with disabilities with the Enabling Employment Credit (EEC). The EEC provides employers with wage offsets for each Singaporean person with disability earning below $4,000 per month that they employ.

In addition, persons with disabilities seeking employment could tap on the Open Door Programme (ODP), which is administered by SG Enable with support from Workforce Singapore. The ODP provides job placement and job support services for persons with disabilities and their employers.

Persons with disabilities receive up to one year of job matching, training and other support services provided by partner organisations such as Autism Resource Centre and Movement for the Intellectually Disabled of Singapore. These partner organisations are experienced in working with persons with autism and persons with intellectual disability and have trained job coaches to provide customised employment support to these individuals. Employees with disabilities can also tap on the ODP Training Grant for upskilling and training courses for continual learning and training. The ODP Training Grant, which was enhanced in July 2020, offers 95% course subsidy and a training allowance for employees. Between 2014 and 2020, under the ODP, SG Enable and its partners placed over 3,000 clients in employment through job placement and job support services, and trained more than 2,500 persons with disabilities.

Amid the continued impact of COVID-19 on Singaporeans, the Government launched three new programmes to enhance access to training and employment opportunities for PwDs this year. The new customised Place and Train (PnT), Attach and Train (AnT) and Skills Development Programmes (SDP) complement existing efforts under the ODP, to support employment and training for PwDs.

Persons with disabilities who participate in any of these programmes will benefit from a 90% course fee subsidy for courses that they attend while employers will receive up to 90% of salary support from the Government for the placement of these persons with disabilities. These efforts will help to enhance access to training, employment and other related opportunities for persons with disabilities amid the continued impact of COVID-19 on Singaporeans, as well as to lower the costs for employers, host companies and training providers in offering these new programmes to persons with disabilities. More than 100 PwDs have benefited from these programmes. We will review whether to continue the programmes after this year.

The Jobs Growth Incentive (JGI) was introduced in August 2020 to support employers to expand local hiring. Employers hiring eligible locals can receive up to $15,000 per hire. Those hiring mature workers, persons with disabilities and ex-offenders will receive higher support of up to $54,000 per hire. The JGI has supported the hiring of more than 1,600 persons with disabilities as at February 2021. This includes PwDs who may have been out of the labour force, but are now able to find a job with the support of progressive employers.

About six in 10 were not employed at the point of hire, and more than half of these persons had been out of work for more than six months.

To encourage more employers to hire persons with disabilities, President’s Challenge 2020 focused its year-long efforts on empower persons with disabilities through rallying employers to reaffirm their commitment to inclusive hiring. As at 31 August 2021, 148 employers have pledged their commitment. In addition, SG Enable launched the Enabling Mark in October 2020, the first national-level accreditation framework that benchmarks and recognises organisations for their best practices and outcomes in disability-inclusive employment. The inaugural Enabling Mark Awards Ceremony was held last month where 88 organisations were accredited with the Enabling Mark.

Building on these efforts, MSF is currently working with its partners to implement the recommendations of the Third Enabling Masterplan’s (EMP3) Workgroup on Preparing Persons with Disabilities for the Future Economy.

The workgroup released their report in April 2021 and its recommendations seek to better prepare special education students for employment, create new employment opportunities for persons with disabilities, support them in upgrading their skills and better recognise and incentivise inclusive employers. The Government has accepted these recommendations and has started implementing some of them over the past year, for example, by enhancing the Open Door Programme (ODP) Training Grant and introducing the Enabling Employment Credit (EEC) and the Enabling Mark. We will continue to monitor our existing measures and explore ways to enhance lifelong learning as well as employment opportunities for individuals with autism and intellectual disability through the Enabling Masterplan 2030.