Just over two years ago I wrote about the brick wall my son Ben would face after finishing inclusive secondary school. Ben, who has an intellectual disability due to Down Syndrome, will not have any qualifications. A third of all 16-year-olds also exit compulsory education without a single Secondary Education Certificate result. Such school leavers normally can continue education or training through courses at Higher Secondary at Naxxar or the Mcast at Kordin. However, for Ben and his fellow intellectually disabled students, choices are much narrower.

What are his further education options? If he hurries, he can be one of the eight school leavers who might enter the two-year "Pathway" programme at Mcast. This must be the only numerus clausus "higher" education course run in Malta. The course name is misleading, as it not vocational and gives no qualification for further courses, Mcast or otherwise. It is merely a series of tasters of various other sectors, with very long breaks in between. Pathway is actually not run at the Mcast campus, but as a segregated group at the Higher Secondary. This course is not to be found on the prospectus...

He could enter the Institute for Tourism Studies, where he would qualify for a three-month version of their two-year vocational course, shorn completely of the academic content. Few who have undergone this course have acquired a job.

He can always enrol in a "special school" or enter an "adult training centre" and become effectively institutionalised. There he would not follow a training course and would still not emerge with any qualifications for employment. He would be cared for, fed, bussed, and be baby-sat.

What has Ben formally acquired from his "compulsory education"? He has learned how to write and read to a level in English and Maltese; he has composed and given PowerPoint presentations about himself to trainee facilitators. He chats incessantly on MSN and is a big fan of YouTube.

However, the system after all these years formally credits him with nothing and welcomes him nowhere. He has potentially 50-60 years of life left, yet what he can give us remains ignored and discarded. Since he turned 16 last May he can receive his disability life pension.

Other parents of disabled youths on reaching the age 16 milestone seem to be resigned to accept this status quo. Perhaps resistance is really a fairly useless effort, and so many of us are really burnt-out, anyway. Bringing up these people is a strain, and there is a constant worry of "who will look out for him when I'm not around?"

What support is there? The big "charitable" foundations seem busy in-fighting on mergers and fund-raising. The National Commission Persons with Disability is silent on this issue of 16plus for the intellectually disabled. The Church offers residential care but not a future. Equal Partners Foundation publicly tabled a structured proposal to the government in August 2006 to bridge secondary school and the workplace - and they're still awaiting a response.

Lino Spiteri et al in May 2005 concluded the Inclusive Education and Special Education Review with a chapter entitled Crossing the Workplace Desert thus: "...transiting to the workplace was like trying to cross an unending desert, hardly ever alleviated by an oasis of any description.... The Working Group agrees with parents of disabled students that the inclusive and special education process must not lead to an employment desert. It is not enough to stress that disabled persons should be recognised for their positive potential... There ought to be awareness among employers that, whatever the different colour of our personal make-up, all of us together make up the rainbow of humanity. If it did not include each one of us, the rainbow would be incomplete."

What is Ben to do? After all these years of effort, we come to the stage when we, as his parents, have run out of time and options. For people like Ben there has been no development; there has been no action, and there is really no future.

Four years on from the Spiteri report, the desert is as arid as ever. And there are no rainbows in sight.