One of the most significant accessibility advances in Irish education last year happened in a further education centre in Cork, and it involved no artificial intelligence at all.
In 2025, SOLAS, Cork ETB and the educational psychology team at Dyslexia Ireland piloted a different way of assessing adults for dyslexia. Rather than routing learners towards long waiting lists and private assessment fees, the pilot brought the process into local Further Education centres and delegated the administrative work to ETB staff, effectively freeing the psychologists to do only what psychologists must. In this pilot, forty adults across the Cork ETB region were assessed, in what the partners describe as “the comfortable, familiar setting of their local further education centre, and without any cost to the learner“. Participants called the experience life-changing, and discussions are under way about extending the model across all sixteen ETBs in Ireland.
No model was trained and no software was procured, but the monumental change was around who did which task. While admittedly this makes it an unlikely opening for an article about useful AI practice because it sets the standard against which AI projects in the sector should be measured, an important question on ‘Did the number of learners who can actually experience access go up?’ remains of key relevance.
The pilot also leads into some of the sharpest practical questions facing further education right now: with diagnosis being the gateway to accommodation, and accommodations becoming increasingly AI-driven. Text-to-speech, speech-to-text, summarisation and structure support are ordinary features of tools every learner already carries, and for a learner with dyslexia they can be the difference between submitting work and not submitting it. The same tool is therefore misconduct for one learner and access for another, and the line between the two often rests on whether a piece of documentation exists. Tutors and quality assurance staff meet this question weekly, usually without a clear policy that addresses or guides it directly.
Two Education and Training Boards are handling the surrounding practice unusually well, in quite different ways:
Limerick and Clare ETB built its approach as a joint project between its Technology Enhanced Learning service and its Quality Assurance service, working through three phases: 1) raising awareness, then 2) developing guidelines on AI use in assessment, and finally 3) rolling out professional development. The structural decision is easy to overlook and does most of the work. A learning technologist working alone tends to produce enthusiasm, meanwhile a quality assurance function working alone tends to produce prohibition. Now compelled to collaborate, together these experts produce guidance that practitioners can use and which will hold up under scrutiny. This line of thinking now travels beyond the region, as Máire Lynch, a quality assurance officer, and Dr Brendan Ryan, a learning technologist, facilitate national professional development sessions for further education staff through the Further Education Support Service.
Pivoting to Cavan and Monaghan ETB, it can be noted that they took a route which albeit different, remains worthwhile of adopting. They wrote AI-in-assessment guidelines for learners rather than for staff. The document explains in plain terms that assessments will be classified as unrestricted or restricted, that any AI use must be acknowledged and referenced, that outputs must be checked against other sources, and that submitted work must reflect the learner’s own analysis. Most institutions write AI policy for their educators and leave learners to infer the rules from a handbook. Rather than automatically assuming that the onus is now on the learners to police themselves on AI ethics, in a sector where many learners are returning to education after years away, it must be taken that writing the rule for the person it binds is a meaningful act of inclusion.
Most guidance in the sector still shares one gap, and closing it would cost very little. Integrity-focused policies describe at length what learners may or should not do. What needs reinforcing going forward is the information on what a learner with a disability may legitimately rely on. The way this practice spreads is itself instructive.
The Further Education Support Service runs its AI sessions free and online, facilitated by practitioners drawn from ETBs and institutes of technology rather than by external consultants, several of them certified Universal Design for Learning facilitators – which is why accessibility keeps surfacing in sessions ostensibly about assessment. The same pattern was visible at this year’s ETBI further education conference, where Kerry ETB presented on dyslexia assessment and Waterford & Wexford ETB demonstrated immersive healthcare training built on Universal Design for Learning principles.
This is the work AI4VET4AI exists to support: co-developing learning pathways and teaching resources with partners across eleven European countries, and taking seriously the experience of the educators and learners already doing the work. At Griffith College, the Research and Innovation Hub’s strand within the project examines exactly this interplay between AI and further education.
Figure A: Griffith College Computer Labs
Ireland’s further education sector has long been strongest where it is least visible: in learner support, second-chance education, and in the slow work of making a qualification reachable. The lesson emerging from its centres is not about which tools to adopt. Rather, these industry examples of best practice are leading the conversation away from the mainstream tool updates and model training, and refocuses on the call for design thinking that asks who does the work and how do we ensure no one gets left behind in this digital transformation in the age of AI.
Article by Jeanette Garcia Kola, Griffith College Dublin
Sources
Dyslexia Ireland, Pilot Adult Dyslexia Assessment Project, with SOLAS and Cork ETB (March 2026) https://dyslexia.ie/pilot-adult-dyslexia-assessment-project/
Further Education Support Service, “AI for Teaching, Learning and Assessment in FET” (Limerick and Clare ETB approach; facilitators Máire Lynch and Dr Brendan Ryan) https://www.fess.ie/ai-for-teaching-learning-and-assessment-in-fet
FESS, Artificial Intelligence (AI) professional development listing: https://www.fess.ie/professional-development/pd-2025-view-all-categories/artificial-intelligence-ai
Cavan and Monaghan ETB, Guidelines for Learners on the use of AI in Assessment (v1.1) https://www.cmetb.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Ratified-AI-in-Assessment-Guidelines-for-Learners-v1.1.pdf
ETBI, FET Conference 2026 workshops: https://library.etbi.ie/fet26/workshops
SOLAS, ETBI and AHEAD, Guidance for Implementing Universal Design for Learning in Irish Further Education and Training: https://www.solas.ie/guidance-for-implementing-universal-design-for-learning-in-irish-further-education/
