Response by Skill: National Bureau for Students with Disabilities to 21St Century Skills

Response by Skill: National Bureau for Students with Disabilities to 21st Century Skills

Skill: National Bureau for Students with Disabilities promotes opportunities to empower young people and adults with any kind of disability to realise their potential in further, continuing and higher education, training and employment throughout the United Kingdom. Skill works by providing information and advice to individuals, promoting good practice and influencing policy in partnership with disabled people, service providers and policy makers.

Skill welcomes the opportunity to respond to 21st Century Skills. While supporting many of the points made in the document Skill is still concerned that certain questions need answering if the document is to be pertinent to all disabled learners. The response below lists these questions underneath each chapter heading.

Chapter One – Overview

The Overview to 21st Century Skills states the desire to ‘develop an inclusive society that promotes employability for all’.

People with disabilities and learning difficulties are significantly under-represented both in achievement in learning and in employment. 21st Century Skills notes that up to 48% of people with disabilities lack a qualification at Level Two or above. Similar percentages apply to the number of people with disabilities and learning difficulties who are unemployed. It is therefore essential that any strategy does not merely state its desire to be inclusive but also puts forward specific strategies as to how these inequalities are to be redressed.

It is also important that the document states clearly the legal obligations which both the LSC and individual employers and providers have to these groups of people.

The LSC has duties to ‘have regard to the needs of learners’ with learning difficulties and disabilities (Section 13), and to‘ promote equality of opportunity between disabled and non disabled people’ (Section 14).

Employers have duties (under Part Two of the Disability Discrimination Act, training providers (under Part Three) and educational providers (under Part Four) not to discriminate against disabled people and to provide reasonable adjustments for them.

Chapter Two – Skills for Employers, Support for Employees

As stated above, despite the fact that employers have duties under Part Two of the Disability Discrimination Act, people with disabilities and learning difficulties are significantly under-represented in employment.

Questions which the strategy needs to address are:

How to make employers aware of this under-representation?
How to make them more aware of the potential of people with disabilities and learning difficulties as employees?
How best to support them in providing the ‘reasonable adjustments’ for people with disabilities and learning difficulties which they are legally obliged to provide?
How in particular to ensure that employers employing under 15 people who are currently exempt from DDA Part 2 but will be coming under it from October 2004, are aware and able to fulfil their new duties?

Chapter Three – the Sector Role

The Sector Skills Councils could have an important role in developing the inclusion of disabled people in the workforce.

Questions which need to ask include:

How can we ensure that the voices of people with disabilities and learning difficulties are listened to in the setting up of the Sector Skills Councils?

Chapter Four – Skills for Individuals

This chapter contains welcome information on how learners will be supported in a variety of ways to overcome their barriers to learning. It also includes a positive recognition of the importance of non vocational learning and a commitment that all learners with disabilities should have access to additional support funding (para.4.49).

Specific questions which need to be addressed include:

How can we ensure that those learners with learning difficulties who might never gain even a part of an NVQ Level Two but for whom some kind of work is still a realistic option also receive the support given to learners who are working towards level Two? It is very important that there is not an implicit assumption that if someone cannot achieve a Level 2 they are therefore unemployable.
How can we ensure that non vocational learning is seen as being of equal status to vocational learning?
How can we ensure that the current desire to reduce bureaucracy does not detract from the importance of creating a system of additional support funding for learners with disabilities which is based on individual assessment and addresses individual need?

Chapter Five – Reforming Qualifications and Training programmes

This chapter contains welcome information on the need to make qualifications and training programmes more flexible and better tailored to individual need. A specific question which needs to be addressed is:

How can we ensure that learning programmes which do not lead to a formal qualification receive equal status and are carried out with the same rigour as accredited programmes?

Chapter Six – Reforming the Supply Side – Colleges and Training Providers

This chapter particularly focuses on the four elements of Success for All. It also looks at the need to open up the market and bring in new providers and provides information on income targets for colleges and fee remission Fundamental questions which needs to be asked are:

How can the principles of Inclusive Learning (Tomlinson, FEFC, 1996) be used to underpin Success for All to ensure that provider reforms create colleges and training providers which are able to match the needs of all learners?
How can we ensure that ALL new providers deliver inclusive provision and fulfil the requirements laid down in the Disability Discrimination Act? Specialist providers who cater for the particular needs of certain disabled groups have a part to play. However it is also essential that disabled learners have the same range of choice as any other learner.
How can we ensure that the setting of income targets does not become a mechanism for excluding certain learners, in particular learners with disabilities and learning difficulties? There is a particular issue here which needs addressing concerning learners on Incapacity Benefit. IB is not a means tested benefit and thus learners who are solely on IB are not entitled to remission of fees despite the fact that they may be on a very low income with their IB only being used to cover disability related expenses. This is an issue which higher education has now addressed but further education has not.

Chapter Seven – Partnerships for Delivery

This chapter addresses the need for close collaboration between agencies both at national and local level. It also examines the needs of learners in Job Centre Plus and in Offenders Institutions.

Questions which need to be asked include:

How can we ensure that the closer collaboration advocated between DfES and DWP creates stronger links between learning programmes and supported employment programmes?
How can we ensure that collaboration also extends to the Department of Health whose White Paper Valuing People contains many strategies for supporting people with learning disabilities into employment?
How can we ensure that RDA’s take account of the needs of disabled learners in their agenda?
How can we ensure that DWP addresses fully the specific issue of how employment might effect disabled peoples’ entitlement to benefits? A recent research project which looked at people with learning difficulties making the transition from college to employment (Making the Jump, NIACE) found that in many cases the fear of losing benefit and being less well off made learners and their families reluctant to consider the option of employment. Although it was not always the case that these learners would in fact have been less well off, there seemed to be a dearth of advisers who could explain the details of how work would affect benefits to them.
How can we ensure that learners with disabilities and learning difficulties both on Job Centre Plus programmes and in Offenders Institutions have equal access to specialist support as those learners in colleges? Recent research has shown the considerable over-representation of, in particular, people with hidden disabilities (learning difficulties, dyslexia and mental health difficulties) in Offenders Institutions, and the same patterns are likely to occur in Job Centre Plus provision. However, currently these learners often do not receive the additional support they require.

Skill Policy Team

October 2003