Supporting Diversity and Difference: Support Workers in Lifelong Learning
Kate Thomas, University of Bristol, UK
Paper presented at the 35th Annual SCUTREA Conference July 5-July 7 2005, University of Sussex, England, UK
Introduction
Support workers play a key role in ensuring that disabled people can access education on equal terms with their non-disabled peers. Their role is demanding and complex, for the nature of the support provided depends on the interactions between the disabled person’s impairment, their access needs and the educational setting. Support workers are themselves a diverse group, working at the heart of diversity and difference in our educational organisations and in a range of other settings.
This paper will explore the experiences of adult learners on a support worker training programme at the University of Bristol and their subsequent experiences of paid work. It will examine how effectively a curriculum underpinned by the social model of disability equips learners to provide a professional service to disabled people in lifelong learning and other settings; and how the programme is evolving in order to address the needs of diverse groups of adult learners.
The paper will outline the background to the Personal Support Worker in Employment programme at the University of Bristol and highlight key features of the curriculum, including developments over the past two years. Interviews have been conducted with past learners now employed as support workers in lifelong learning settings to examine their experiences of the programme and of paid work, their perceptions of the support worker role and of their own professional identity. In what ways are they prepared for employment and what does the role offer them as professionally trained individuals in a fledgling profession?
The Personal Support Worker programme
In 1998 the Centre for Access and Communication Studies at the University of Bristol received European Social Fund (ESF) funding to run a Human Aids to Communication (HAC) course, training lipspeakers and notetakers to work with the D/deaf community. Since then, and with the aid of further tranches of European funding, the training programme has expanded to become a Pathway Certificate in Social Sciences (Personal Support Work with Disabled People) accredited by the University of Bristol at Level 0 (equivalent to NVQ Level 3). The Personal Support Worker (PSW) programme has evolved within the context of Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA) legislation and the consequent increase in employment opportunities in support work. There is a growing need to professionalise the role in order to ensure disabled people’s needs are met effectively and consistently. The Bristol course is unique in the UK in offering a broad, vocational training, equipping individuals to work in a range of capacities and settings, and providing a firm foundation for further professional development.
The training is underpinned by the social model of disability. Originating from the disabled people's movement in the 1970s and Finklestein and Hunt's desire to reclaim 'disability' from medicine and social care, the social model breaks the link between impairment and disability: 'disability is imposed on top of impairment by…isolation and exclusion from society' (Swain 2004:14). Trainee support workers are therefore encouraged to look for organisational, physical and attitudinal barriers facing disabled clients and ways in which they can enable the client to overcome them. A significant proportion of the training is designed and delivered by disabled tutors; disabled people also participate as guest speakers and facilitators.
Four cohorts - a total of 52 learners - have so far completed the training with 14 enrolled on the current programme. The employment rate as support workers after course completion is 73%. The programme is part-time and takes place in three-day blocks over a period of nine months at a course venue in Bristol, where students can choose to be residential if they wish. The current programme is funded as part of a Higher Education ESF Objective 3 National Project and runs from March to December 2005. In order to be eligible, applicants must be between the ages of 18 and 65, working no more than 16 hours per week and resident in England, but not in ESF Objective 1 funded regions: Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, Merseyside and South Yorkshire. Applicants meeting the eligibility criteria are invited to attend a Selection Day; if successful, their tuition fees, accommodation, meals, travel and child/dependent care costs are met throughout the programme.
The PSW programme allows space for professional development across a range of related fields. Modules include: Disability Equality, Deaf Awareness and Communication Tactics with Deaf People, Deafblind Support Work, Working with Visually Impaired People, Working with People with Learning Difficulties, Working with People with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Working with People experiencing Mental or Emotional Distress and Notetaking for Deaf People. Learners also complete a personal and professional development module entitled Workwise: Professional Development for Personal Support Workers, this includes a short work placement.
In addition to the named qualification in Personal Support Work, there is the opportunity to gain nationally recognised Council for the Advancement of Communication with Deaf People (CACDP) qualifications in Communication Tactics with Deaf People, Deaf Awareness, Deafblind Support Work and Notetaking for Deaf People.
While the programme appeals to learners with a range of personal, professional and educational backgrounds and within a cohort ages have ranged between 21 and 64, a typical student profile is that of a female learner, in her early forties, who may be a returner to learning and/or employment, seeking flexible employment opportunities. Three of the 66 learners past and present are male. 26% are unemployed at the start of the programme. A similar percentage each year is seeking a career change from established roles in fields such accountancy, nursing, information technology and administration. Very few learners have just left full-time education. Learners' highest qualifications range from NVQ Level 2 to Level 5; approximately 50% are graduates. 20% are lone mothers and 10% declare a disability prior to coming on the programme. Applications from individuals already working in a support role and seeking professional training are increasing year on year - 50% of the current cohort work part-time as support workers, or have had experience of doing so (University of Bristol ESF Project Data 2001-2005).
The reality behind these statistics is an impressive diversity within any one cohort. Learners bring a considerable portfolio of transferable skills to the course. However, they often lack confidence in their learning, are uncomfortable with both traditional 'academic' and more flexible methods of learning and assessment; or may be unsure how to job search effectively or how to manage self-employment. This diversity places demands upon the curriculum to provide not only a thorough professional grounding in support work, but also to integrate personal and professional development with impairment-specific training and to accommodate a wide range of educational backgrounds, learning styles and learning needs.
The Workwise module was introduced in 2004 to go further towards addressing these requirements. Prior to that date, the training programme consisted of separate, impairment-specific modules taught by different tutors. While the different perspectives and range of expertise was highly valued by learners, the training lacked cohesion and any focus on moving into employment. Workwise introduced personal and professional development components including skills audits, goal setting and action planning, assertiveness training, CV writing and strategies for employment. This module 'wraps around' impairment-specific modules and, in tandem with accreditation as a named Pathway Certificate qualification, gives greater coherence to the programme. A reflective Learning Journal, work placement, project work and a tutorial structure now integrate learning across the programme as a whole, while a personal tutor provides guidance and support in applying acquired knowledge and skills to the job market.
Inevitably, because the programme originated as a series of individual short courses, the curriculum reflects a range of different approaches, with systems or competency-based, and cognitive approaches predominating. The Working with Visually Impaired People module adopts a competency-based approach; learners develop and are assessed on specific skills eg: guiding, reading on to tape and audio description, within the context of the differing access needs of visually impaired people and factors which affect how individuals cope with their sight loss.Notetaking for Deaf People also focuses rigorously on the development and assessment of technical skills and their professional application. A cognitive approach is used across a range of modules for example, in the consideration of professional dilemmas, roles and boundaries. Learners apply new and prior learning in the context of supporting disabled people in different capacities and settings and are assessed through written commentaries, case studies, role-play and group discussion tasks. Since 2004, there has been an increased emphasis on an experiential approach focusing on what the learner finds ‘personally significant and personally useful’ (Toohey 1999). Project work and action planning encourage learners to devise learning tasks and goals of most relevance to their own requirements. For example, a learner may present their final project on an organisation where they completed their placement and for whom they hope to work at a later date. Curriculum content and teaching methods are constantly evolving in order to maintain currency with disability legislation, debates within the disability field, and professional practice. Formal and informal mechanisms for learner feedback are also an essential part of the review cycle.
Learner Experiences
Learners respond differently to every module, depending on existing skills and knowledge, their interest in the area and employment aspirations. However, at the start of the programme, the social model approach to support work inevitably challenges existing perceptions; predominantly that of a 'female' role concerned with 'care'. As Ruth, a learner with previous experience of support work with people with learning difficulties said:
That was what was good about that course, there was nothing about personal care, it was very much about giving people power - not taking power away.
And Catriona, with experience of working with the elderly said:
I had the same preconception that it was about a lot of care…but the whole idea of it was vastly different.I realised that there was so much more to it – all the different roles – I saw it much more as a profession.
For Becky, moving out of a nursing career, the focus on a different professional identity as a support worker based on the social model was crucial:
When you’re a nurse you put on a uniform and a name badge and you have an automatic boundary, you’re the nurse and they’re the patient. I found it quite hard not being anything, that whole boundary thing was incredibly different for me– I found that incredibly useful on the course.
Becky also articulated the value of working with disabled tutors:
You could concentrate on individual impairments, find out about them from the tutors and the other people involved in the module with those impairments - realising what’s it’s really like for people, not just giving it lipservice. And gain practical skills like guiding - away from a work environment, in a safe space.
Other training programmes in the FE and HE sectors tend to specialise in discrete fields of personal support work (eg: notetaking, working with people with learning difficulties) and/or be aimed at individuals working in specific settings. The wider spectrum offered by the Bristol programme gives learners who are new to the field or looking for a new direction in a support role: 'an overview of all of it, so you don’t just aim for one thing'. Learners are prepared for employment through a short placement, a range of portfolio tasks and a three-day block dedicated to employment strategies: creating effective CVs, making speculative applications, interview skills and identifying strategies and resources for finding employment. Catriona thought:
Most people gained more self-confidence about working life in general, particularly those who had been away from work for long periods.
The qualifications offered by the programme: a named certificate in support work as well as individual certificates in D/deaf-related subjects have significance at a personal level as well as for a CV:
The course gives you … a really useful…package of qualifications. It gives you confidence to approach different organisations and see if there’s a role for me here.
For learners who have been out of the job market for some time, this is an important outcome; a sense of momentum in terms of personal development also encourages them to see the end of the course as a new phase in their own growth:
At the end of this course you were encouraged to look at what you could be doing in terms of continuing to acquire skills – things like learning to drive, improving computer skills - it made you realise the gaps you’d got left.
The focus on employment strategies and soft outcomes such as confidence and assertiveness is relevant for women returners; it is no less relevant to unemployed men who wish to retrain after redundancy or ill-health, or younger adults who have not yet entered the job market; these individuals also form part, albeit a much smaller percentage, of the learner groups and the diversity of the group each time the programme is run both challenges and enriches the learning experiences of everyone involved. Those interviewed felt that that the diversity of the group had been an important part of the learning experience:
You learn a lot from each other, from each other’s experiences, not just from the tutors. It was a very supportive, interactive group.
Becky commented:
The beauty was that there was so much experience and range and depth of people, all ages and backgrounds, that was so good.We weren’t all 18, we were mature enough to know you need to develop and appreciated all we learned.
Catriona agreed:
That was one of the deciding factors for me. Before starting the course, people said to me – it might be just school leavers, why are you doing it? – I would have been less keen if it had been school leavers.But some people were working, there were people who'd done degrees and people who were just there to get ideas, who hadn't done anything for a long time. I thought it worked really well.
The mix of learners on the course requires skilful management, particularly in group work and in the approach to assessment tasks. A crucial process at the start of the programme is the setting of ground rules by the group, encouraging a collective responsibility for learning. Study skills are included in the programme induction and offered on an optional basis thereafter. Individuals are invited through self-assessment to recognise and value their skills and strengths and to set short as well as longer-term goals throughout the programme. This particularly benefits learners with least confidence in their skills and abilities. Catriona said:
Some people on the course had really had no educational opportunities and didn’t believe themselves capable of going on to further education and now there are few taking things further, they really enjoyed the study aspect of the course.
This is supported by Ruth:
I enjoyed the whole learning experience. I hadn't done it for such a long time. I wasn't confident to begin with about any of the academic stuff, writing an essay - I couldn't remember the last time I wrote an essay!
Ruth, also felt that the all-female nature of the group had been conducive to her own learning:
All women - I liked that, I know some people thought it would have been better if there had been some men - I don't know who for, I think I'd have felt a bit sorry for a couple of blokes there with all of us!…it felt safer, it was easier.
Common experiences, including the barriers some women were facing in attending the course may have increased a sense of solidarity. Ruth, who lived locally, became a residential student halfway through the course:
It was fantastic to be able to stay somewhere and learn - it did help…if there was work to do during the module, I wasn't really doing that properly because I was going home and making tea.
Catriona faced a domestic debate over changing priorities during the programme:
Once when my daughter was ill my husband and I were having a tussle about who would stay at home and he was saying ‘I can’t miss this conference and I was saying ‘I can’t miss this course!' In the end she was well enough to go to school.
Since completing the course Ruth has returned to work after a period of five years and is enjoying her new role.
Now I’m a Notetaker for D/deaf people… part of the support worker network at college…my job description is quite specific, I have core hours, I’ve got a contract. I've got some control…it’s very new to me to be able to say what I want, as an employee. I really enjoy it. I actually look forward to going to workand meeting different students.