18
Examination of witnesses
Bethany Bale, Amy Little and Lynne Turnbull.
Q41 The Chair: I would like to welcome our witnesses to this public meeting of the committee, which is looking into the transition from education to employment for young disabled people. I will start, if I may, by asking you about your roles.
Bethany Bale: Thank you. I am policy and campaigns officer at Disability Rights UK.
Lynne Turnbull: I am the chief executive officer at Disability Positive in Cheshire.
Amy Little: I am head of advocacy at Leonard Cheshire Disability.
Q42 The Chair: I have the first question. We are interested in the support that young disabled people receive when they are moving from education into work. Do you think it is enough and of sufficiently high quality? What are your general impressions?
Amy Little: Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. The general impression we get is that current support is not adequate. We draw that conclusion from the many young people we meet through our Change 100 programme, which introduces young disabled graduates to employment internship opportunities, and from the extensive work we have done directly with young people to inform our policy work and our response to the Government’s Green Paper, for example. We have asked specific questions on the guidance and advice that young disabled people receive, and generally the feedback is that it is not tailored to disability at all. Support is focused on university as a route to employment, rather than employment itself.
We find that where employment is discussed in terms of specific roles, there are issues with assumptions and a lack of understanding. There is a focus on the social model of disability, in terms of adjustments that employers should be making rather than trying to dispel these assumptions and poor stereotypes of disabled people in the workplace. So there can be discrimination there.
The feedback we have had time and again, particularly at school level but also at university, is that the careers advice is from people who have had no training in disability, so they do not have that specific angle. Disability-specific improvements would have a huge impact in building young disabled people’s confidence, because the feedback we receive is that young disabled people do not always have the confidence to believe that they can enter a job, whatever job that may be, because of their own disability. If you take the social model of disability as your starting point, there is no reason why anyone should not be able to do any job at all.
The other aspect that came through from young people was that practical advice is not there in the form of the tools that are available to them to access the jobs they want to do in the future. They would like to have their eyes opened to jobs they had not necessarily considered. They would like to learn how to use tools like Access to Work and know their rights when it comes to reasonable adjustments. We have heard that sometimes there might be advice on accessibility for a course at university, and sometimes that advice is better, but not on accessibility and the wider workplace.
The Chair: Thanks very much. That is really helpful.
Lynne Turnbull: I agree with a lot of the points that Amy has just made. In addition, the young people we speak to say that what is lacking is advice from peers, other people who found employment and who have that lived experience, so that those young people can understand what someone else's experience has been and how they have overcome barriers in the workplace. That real peer-led support is incredibly helpful to young disabled people who are navigating the transition from education to employment. There is a wide range of support and advice for young disabled people, but the amount that they receive as peer support can be quite limited.
For me, it is really important that a young person is able to talk to older disabled people—if we can refer to them as that—who are already in the workplace, about their experiences. That will give them real examples from people who may face the same barriers. Also, as Amy has just said, it is important to make sure that there is good-quality disability equality training for people who are receiving or providing support and advice to those in transition. It is incredibly important that they look at how they promote flexible working practices and provide real examples of how you can get a younger person ready for leaving education.
The Chair: We might come back a bit later to the programme on peer support which I know you run, but that is very helpful.
Bethany Bale: Apologies, I have a cold at the moment, so you will have to bear with me. Building on from both points, it boils down to those two areas: a lack of adequate advice, and a lack of practical support not only at the start of transition but pre-transition.
In terms of adequate advice, the two key areas are a real lack of frequent, quality careers advice and, as Amy mentioned, sometimes the bias of advisers.
We have heard from young people that this can be in contradictory ways. A young disabled person might have high grades, for example, and want to do an apprenticeship but is told, ‘You shouldn’t do an apprenticeship because you have high grades, so you must go to university’. Equally, sometimes young disabled people who want to go to university are told, ‘You’re disabled, so actually one of these other routes would be much better for you’.
We find that careers advisers often do not have time to build a relationship with the young person and do not understand their specific experience and the barriers they face. That means that the careers adviser gives unhelpful and limiting advice that can lead to young people not raising their aspirations as highly as they might want to and not reaching their full potential.
On the advice point, I would say that there is no education on rights for young people. That is a key issue, particularly when we know that most of the time, throughout their education and when they get into employment, young people have to advocate for themselves to receive the support they need. Often, they do not know that their rights not being delivered is unlawful and that they can challenge that.
We did some research through our disabled students helpline this year, and of 650 respondents only 3% said they had a complete grasp of the rules on sharing information on their disability in education, training, and employment. That is a key point to make. We know that this leads to unchallenged discrimination, poor self-esteem, and a negative impact on mental health at a pivotal time for young people when they are trying to form their own understanding of their abilities and their aspirations.
We know that barriers to support throughout education mean that, by the time young people get to transition it is often too late. For example—I am sure there is more detail in the written evidence—only 4% of disabled students have access to an Education Health and Care Plan. There is no accountable framework for the 96% who are left, so most young people spend their entire education journeys fighting for that EHCP. We also know that 96% of SEND tribunals find in favour of the parents, which shows that very often this is a case of gatekeeping and delaying when it comes to the support that young people need. All the while this is going on, young people cannot reach their full potential in school, and they face barriers with late diagnosis. The average wait time for autism and ADHD assessments at the moment is 88 weeks, and the longest time is up to five years.
We know that discrimination exists across education policies and practices. There is a lot more written evidence that we can provide on this, but, very broadly, SEND students face disproportionate exclusions, so although they only make up 17% of the school population, they make up half of all school exclusions. Parents are criminalised for low attendance. SEND students also face double the rate of bullying and are three times more likely to experience sexual abuse.
All these things lead to lower outcomes. They are three times less likely to hold any qualifications than non-disabled young people, which often means that, by the time they get to transition, they already have lower outcomes, so they are less likely to be able to access employment. Also they have probably decided what their abilities are and that they cannot reach their full potential so there is no point raising their aspirations in certain ways.
Q43 The Chair: That is very helpful. I have a question that is a bit sideways on. It does not naturally flow from what you said but from a lot of the evidence we have had.
It is fair to say that we have become concerned about the support for people going into colleges. You have all mentioned higher education and work, but what are your perceptions, or views, on the appropriateness of the way further education colleges prepare young people with disabilities for the world of work? You have talked about careers advice, readiness and rights, but, picking up on the information we have received in written evidence, I am thinking more about course content.
Lynne Turnbull: When people are going into further education, they have the same barriers. We still have people who do not understand the experience of the young disabled person or truly understand what reasonable adjustments someone might need to enable them to access course content and how that might need to be varied. The definition of what is accessible can vary massively depending on who is making that call and their version of accessibility.
It all comes down to the training that people have and the balance between what support we put in place for providers and, equally, for employers. What we do on the other side of that is the stick, if you like. If people are not making those reasonable adjustments and not doing what they can to improve outcomes for young disabled people, there must be some sanctions. They must demonstrate what is being put in place to make sure that young disabled people get the same opportunities as non-disabled young people.
Bethany Bale: Things like traineeships and supported internships can be very useful options for young disabled people, but sometimes we find that those on traineeships can be pushed towards life skill-type courses.
The Chair: Are you talking about traineeships in college?
Bethany Bale: Yes, but also third sector traineeships. Often there can be a limitation in the subjects available for a young person, so they might be pushed to look more at life skills than a subject they are interested in. We find that there is a real lack of awareness of the various options that a young person has in further education and the differences between those options.
Amy Little: On Friday, I had a conversation with a brilliant young man called Sam, who you might have heard from in one of the workshops recently. I asked him that question, and his response was, ‘My experience of higher education careers advice was a history teacher who also did a sideline in careers advice for us. He was a very nice man, but he had no idea about disability. It was not on his radar at all’. That is one person's example, but, sadly, it is a reflection of what we see across the piece. There needs to be more specific training and an acknowledgement that this needs to be a core part of careers advice. Right now, it seems to be off the radar.
Q44 Lord Bach: I will change the focus a bit now to the effectiveness, or otherwise, of government schemes at supporting young disabled people during the transition we are talking about. Do you think the Back to Work plan, which the Government announced only last month on 16 November, will help or not? What are your views on that in the context of government schemes generally?
Amy Little: There is a lot to say about government schemes generally, but not so much to say on the Back to Work plan, because we are still digesting it in some ways. There are some positives, such as the acknowledgment that more specialist training and support is needed—there have been some positive announcements there—but what we are not seeing at the moment is any detail on the implementation side of things and mapping out how it will be rolled out and delivered. One of my colleagues attended a two-day workshop a few weeks ago on the universal support programme and did not come out with any clarity about how we can help in that delivery. That seems to have been the feeling around the room.
Going back to the core issue of transition and young people, we are very disappointed that there is no tailored support for young people, particularly in the new announcements. That is a missed opportunity. We know that it can be done, and we know that young people, and employers, have a massive appetite for it. However, in the context of record activity levels, unfortunately the focus and the rhetoric has been on sanctions and not on the tailored support that is necessary. As I say, that is achievable and can be done.
Although it is quite early to tell, we feel that there is work that could be built on. If things like the Restart scheme and individual placement and support can be built on, and if there can be specific tailored support that focuses on disability and young people, they could be a success in the years ahead. Too often, support is not tailored. I would be keen to see whether Bethany and Lynne have similar opinions, because obviously Leonard Cheshire are just one perspective, but, speaking to young people, the feedback we generally receive is that the best support is where programmes are disability-specific to start with, rather than existing support programmes adapted to have disability-specific elements.
All the programmes can be difficult to access for any young person, whether they are disabled or not, so having specific disability support programmes that are tailored and personalised would make a huge difference. They would be more accessible and less competitive. There should not be the competitive process that there is currently. It is hard to get on to many traineeships and support programmes. Kickstart is a good example of an existing programme in that context. Unfortunately, Kickstart had nothing tailored to young disabled people. We kept calling for that and it never happened. Again, that was a missed opportunity.
I do not want to use up my time, so I will talk briefly about Access to Work. That is a brilliant scheme. It has so much promise, but, again, our concerns are about the delivery. You will receive lots of evidence about how long it is taking to process applications: on average, about 49 days this year. I think 27,000 are still waiting for their applications to be processed. When it comes to young people, particularly the young people we work with through Change 100, Access to Work is almost out of the question for short internships, because the application process delays often mean that their internships are finished by the time their applications have even been processed. There is also a lack of awareness among young people themselves and employers.
Going back to the Government's Back to Work plan, we need to see Access to Work fixed. We need to see tailored, specific disability employment support before we try new programmes that are untested and do not have clarity on their implementation and rollout.
Bethany Bale: We are incredibly concerned about the Back to Work proposal. Recent research by the New Economics Foundation estimated that 370,000 people will be forced on to a lower benefit rate with this plan, but only 10,000 people will be pushed into work. That suggests to us that this scheme is far more about austerity and lowering benefit rates than it is about supporting people into employment. We are sure that it will push more disabled people into poverty and into insecure and inaccessible work. A far more helpful policy would be to focus on the systemic barriers to employment that we know exist. We know that the disability wage gap is currently 17.2%. For disabled women, it is 35% and growing. The employment gap is just over 28%. All these numbers are growing. So focusing on targeted employment rather than on sanctions and lowering benefit levels would be far more supportive.
On the point about government schemes generally at this time, during transition—this is very relevant to the Back to Work plan—we find that, depending on the context, there are real gaps and barriers across the public sector for young people when they reach either 16 or 18. They experience a cliff edge in support. In practice, EHC plans often do not remain in place up to the age of 25. In healthcare, the transition from paediatric to adult can be incredibly distressing, and often young people face real barriers trying to access their healthcare at that time. With the change from DLA to PIP at 16, they often find that where they once received DLA, they now do not get PIP. On that financial support point, we find that department practice is not joined up across the board.
As a university student, you cannot access universal credit, and DSA does not cover all additional costs. If you needed adapted housing or a live-in carer or transport, for example, you have nowhere to get that financial support. Also, unlike in higher education, there is no maintenance loan in further education. Students who call us on our helpline tell us that they have gone to college, are excited about their course, but then have no income. There is an assumption that parents receive help to support their children throughout education, but child benefit ends at 18, and if a disabled young person remains in education until a later age, there is no financial support for them. That tends to push them out of education, often making them NEET and putting them into a cycle of benefits because they cannot remain in education and do not have the qualifications to go into work. Also, the longer they are out of work, the longer they are unable to go back into education and training. This system is very unhelpful and tends to be a lot more threatening to young people than it is supportive.
There is also a real confusion about options. Access to Work and delays in it have been mentioned, but young people often do not know that it exists. There are a variety of options available across departments: there are supported internships, traineeships and apprenticeships from DfE, and things like youth hubs and youth coaches at the jobcentre through DWP. For a young disabled person, this is a huge system to navigate; they might not know what their options are, the differences between them, and who they should speak to.
When these policies are created, there is always a lack of co-production with disabled people, and we find that schemes like Back to Work are not in line with or aware of the reality of the barriers that disabled people face. We would recommend making sure that all these policies are co-produced with disabled people so that they can be more aware of the specific ways of targeting support to remove these barriers.
Lord Bach: Thank you. That is very helpful.
Lynne Turnbull: Like Amy, we are still digesting the detail of the Back to Work plan, but it feels as though it has been designed more for people outside education and already in the job market. Real work still needs to be done to make sure that it is tailored for someone entering the world of work for the first time—someone coming from education, for example, rather than someone who is long-term unemployed. The emphasis in the Back to Work plan is on getting people off benefits and into work, and there is talk of potential sanctions, as Bethany said. For us, that is the wrong way to go. It will just make young disabled people retreat further into themselves, as they do not know what support will be available to them. We have employers out there who are uneducated about the support they could put in place. There is a whole piece of work that needs to be done so that the young people, and the employers in the market, as well as the education providers, are better educated all round.
Things like internships, apprenticeships and work placements are a really good idea and could be promoted more as an option for young disabled people, but flexibility is still needed in order to help those with a range of different impairments to enter the world of work. Sometimes work schemes are designed with non-disabled people in mind, so it is crucial to ensure that a person has the support and advice they may need. There is a role here for disabled people's organisations working with employers to highlight some of the benefits and to ‘bust some of the myths’ there may be about employing disabled people.
Access to Work has been well versed in the disabled community, but it is still a best-kept secret. Not many people know about the scheme. There was more evidence in the written submission, but raising the profile of Access to Work is crucial. Access to Work Plus was a great pilot that had great success, particularly with young autistic people, who may, for example, be able to do a particular task repeatedly but would not be able to carry out the full function of the whole role.
In this example, the Access to Work Plus scheme enabled the employer to essentially receive a wage subsidy that made it financially viable for them to employ an autistic person over a non-disabled person, even though, in the initial training period, that non-disabled person might be able to do four tasks in the same time it would take the autistic person to do two. That has the merit for some young people of helping them to access the labour market as they come out of education, but it is another best-kept secret. It was not widely known about and therefore not widely used. More needs to be done to open the door on what support is available, and to co-produce a better solution for getting disabled people into work.
Q45 Lord Laming: For young people who are not going into higher education, what part, if any, do adult social care services play in supporting their transition to work at this critical stage in their lives?
Amy Little: I was quite keen to raise that point, so I am glad to have that question. We see social care as an enabler to employment. Too often, it is overlooked and, unfortunately, provided and assessed at a minimum level. This sounds awful, but often it is a race to the bottom, with local authorities and commissioners looking for the cheapest provision they can get. Access to employment and leisure opportunities, and to your friends and family, are all things that social care can and should support, but too often they are left out of the assessment process and deprioritised when assessing an individual's needs. We see this as a real barrier to employment for many young people and older working-age people, because they do not have access to social care.
Where it is done right, it is fantastic and a real enabler. A lot of people—more likely employers, as well as young people and disabled people in general—are not aware that social care is a right, and that there should be a right to employment. That should be accessed. A lot can change there. The feedback we get from the people we talk to is that it can sometimes take years to access the social care they need to stay in or to access employment, but once they get it, it is a complete game-changer.
A couple of years ago, we also conducted some research looking at improving social care in terms of access to employment and the economic benefits to the country. I will make it clear: economic factors should never be a reason for improving social care, but so often we hear the argument that social care is too expensive to deliver and to reform. Our research shows that if social care could enable more disabled people to access the employment they seek, and to stay in employment, it would pay for itself.
Q46 Lord Porter of Spalding: You have given me an opening for my question. My background is local government, so I know how expensive social care is and how close to the edge it is pushing all our upper-tier councils. If you have the research to show the value-added that spending money wisely would provide now, can we have access to that? If we can go back to the Treasury and say, ‘Give us another £3 billion, but it is worth £10 billion to the economy’, that argument becomes unassailable. At the moment, the Treasury will keep pushing back and saying, ‘We have no new money. You have to make do with what you’ve got there’. Some seriously big, good councils are very close to going over the edge, because demand-led adults’ and children’s services are pushing them that way. It is not because they are badly run; it is because the demand is so high.
The Chair: Amy, if you have any information that you could let us have, that would be useful.
Amy Little: Absolutely, I will share that. It was done by Frontier Economics on our behalf and is very robust. We share those same concerns, particularly in the run-up to local government settlement.
The Chair: Bethany, the same applies to the information you quoted in answer to a previous question. If we do not already have that research in writing, it would be great to have it.
Baroness Stedman-Scott: Bethany, you said that 370,000 people might go on to a lower benefit and that 10,000 might go into jobs. If you have any evidence to back that up—I am not suggesting that you do not—that would be very helpful.
Bethany Bale: Yes, absolutely.
Baroness Stedman-Scott: If any of you have the data to back up the numerical points that you have made, that would be helpful.
Lord Shipley: Before I get on to what I wanted to ask you about, can I pursue two sentences that I have written down from replies that have been given? I think they were from Lynne, but I may be misremembering. One was, ‘It all comes down to the training’. Another statement was, ‘The employers don’t know enough’.
The Chair: I heard that one.
Q47 Lord Shipley: I suspect this has a lot to do with money. Could you identify whether it is just about training or employers knowing enough, or whether it is about the availability of public expenditure. I will start with Bethany, then go to Lynne and then to Amy.
Bethany Bale: Maybe it is a combination of the two. There is absolutely a lack of awareness among employers and training providers generally, but this is possibly because there is not enough accountability, when it comes to it. The Equality Act protects us in lots of ways and gives us access adjustments to do all these things, but more often than not, particularly in employment, we find that it is just not implemented. As we have said, it relies on the individual disabled person advocating for themselves and pushing for their rights, and even then, sometimes it is still not implemented.
I am aware that this is one of the later points, so I do not want to jump in too much, but better accountability and support for employers is not just about whatever schemes government comes up with to improve accountability, whether through fines or whatever. There are cheaper and easier ways to achieve public accountability and better transparency. Workforce reporting of disability is a great way of doing this, and we have seen that there can be much better transparency in employment practices with gender pay gap reporting. Highlighting that awareness and employers having reputational risk can force them to raise their understanding in these areas and to see where they need to tackle the inequalities in their organisations.
Lynne Turnbull: There is still a real lack of awareness. You are probably right that to some degree it is about the funding that is available. We support more than 10,000 disabled people, who for a long time have been telling us that, even though disability is a protected characteristic, it feels as though this has been downgraded. It feels a bit like the poor relation of the protected characteristics at the moment. It feels like a very difficult environment in which to raise that awareness.
The training we have been delivering to employers has been incredibly helpful for them. With that support, they understand how they can be—no pun intended—more disability-positive. As we are a disabled people's organisation employing a workforce of 74% of people with lived experience of disability and long-term health conditions; we understand the things they may be concerned about and can help to overcome them. For example, we hear from employers who think disabled people will take more time off sick. Our own evidence, which we can share and be transparent about, completely disproves that. There is no evidence that disabled people take more time off sick than non-disabled staff members, so training is really important.
We also do work on customer experience audits, which we carry out with people who have their own lived experience of disability and who go into a workplace as a customer, go through that process, give feedback on how they found it, and make recommendations on how customer experience could be improved. Things can be done to improve the landscape. It is about just raising awareness of the support that is available to individuals and to employers.
Amy Little: Two years ago, we also conducted research with employers. Again, it was robust research. One in five employers told us that they would be less likely to hire a disabled person. We delved into the reasons. Sixty-seven per cent said that it was the perceived practicalities of making workplace adjustments, and 29% said that they had concerns about whether a disabled person could do the job, but when we delved further we found that they were based very much on preconceived ideas and assumptions.
As Lynne has described, it is often about those programmes, and the training and consultancy that we and others provide, but more often than not it is about having disabled individuals in the workplace who have the confidence to self-disclose their disability. One in five of us are disabled, so it surrounds us. It is often invisible, but once you understand that and the conversation is out in the open, it has a huge impact on people's attitudes and approaches. That is one side.
The other side comes back to awareness. The perceived practicalities of making workplace adjustments were a concern for 67% of those who said they were less likely to employ a disabled person. We then looked at whether they knew about Access to Work. The majority did not, so that is a solution right there, but it is not known about and there is no awareness. Costs can be a cause, but a lot of it comes down to lack of awareness and confidence. Confidence is what we hear about time and again through our training and consultancy programmes, where we work directly with companies. With that confidence, there is the realisation that, if you get it right for disabled people, you get it right for everybody, and there are real benefits to your organisation.
Bethany Bale: Going back to Amy's points on the assumptions about the difficulties of making adjustments, it is key to recognise that we often view employment as a black and white structure that disabled people exist outside of, and that adjustments are difficult to do and we do them as a favour. Actually, adjustments are also about employers improving their inclusivity more generally. We know that the Equality Act is meant to be anticipatory, although often in practice it is not. Covid is an excellent example of this. For so many years, disabled people fought for better flexibility in the workplace, for home working, things like that, and they were told that it was just not possible because it existed outside this black and white idea of employment. However, since Covid, we have seen that remote working is very possible. With virtual witnesses, we see it today.
That is another key point to make: that sometimes we can view employment as being within very strict structures and that it is a nuisance to change them, but, actually, inclusion benefits everyone. Working from home benefits parents, people with caring responsibilities, all sorts of different groups, so proactively striving for better inclusion and accessibility in the workplace across the board will benefit all groups, not just disabled people.
Q48 Lord Shipley: Outside of national government programmes, what other support can young disabled people seek during this transition? Some things may have been mentioned, but let us make sure that we have it all. Lynne, you may wish to say something about how effective peer learning and peer support is in practice.
Lynne Turnbull: As I touched on briefly, it is incredibly important for us—we can share evidence as a written submission later—that peer learning and peer support achieves better outcomes for people. We feel that is an incredibly effective way of demonstrating to disabled people that other disabled people understand their lives and the position they are in when it comes to transitioning from education to work. The advice we give people who use our services is greatly enhanced by the fact that our workers are often disabled people themselves. People often comment to us on the fact that the person they spoke to understood things much better because they had experienced it themselves.
That is even more so for younger disabled people. Talking to peers will show them that disabled people can succeed in the workplace and lead productive lives in the community, just as non-disabled people can. That may not be the advice they have received. We talked earlier about how they may be sent down particular job routes or particular courses, because people have preconceived ideas about what people are capable of. That peer support aspect and peer learning is incredibly valuable and can raise people's aspirations about what is possible, what can be achieved, and what you can do as a disabled person.
Amy Little: If I may, I will use the example of our flagship programme, Change 100, which supports disabled young people into summer placements, working specifically with people at university or graduates. The programme was referenced in the draft Disability Action Plan, and there is some commitment for Change 100 interns to have placements in the Civil Service, which is a really positive development. We are now in our 11th year. We have worked with 1,200 interns and 225 employers, and 25% of the young people who go through the programme are offered a role with the company they have been placed with.
I do not want to give you stat fatigue—we can follow this up afterwards—but a very high proportion, over 90%, of employers and young people are satisfied with and have benefited from the programme. Our limitation is scale. We have about 750 applications each year. At the moment, we are able to fulfil around 200 to 250 of them. We need to scale it up: we are moving step by step at the moment.
The other aspect is how we raise awareness that it is a programme working with individuals and employers. We are just one programme, but there are others out there in exactly the same situation. We know it works; it is absolutely proven. We just need to support more people in the service we are providing, and we have hopes and ambitions to do that. The lessons we are learning from it clearly show that it is about being a partnership; it is about supporting employers as much as individuals. It is about tailoring support that is specific and personalised, particularly to young disabled people. That is when you get the results.
Bethany Bale: To build on those two points, Disability Rights UK also offers a disabled students’ helpline. We focus on advice and information to signpost young people so that they can be educated on their rights and feel empowered to advocate for themselves when they need to and when looking for employment settings to see red flags in interviews. If they have an idea about what might not be accessible, feel confident that actually it is not their issue and that maybe that employer is not inclusive, perhaps they will want to look somewhere else instead. Our disabled students’ helpline tends to support around 1,500 disabled young people a year. We also have our online fact sheets, which have very similar information but, rather than being on a one-to-one basis, are more broadly on things like how to apply for disabled students’ allowance and how to talk to your employer about reasonable adjustments.
We also have our Disabled Apprentice Network—I know you spoke to members in a previous session about this—to provide not only that peer support but opportunities to speak truth to power. With any support that can be offered by DPOs or the charity sector, it is key to recognise that we can do only so much. If we advise young disabled people on their rights, but then they go to an employer and those rights are not implemented, obviously there is not much we can do. That can be a very disillusioning process for a young person who might not have known about their rights and has been made to feel that they are the problem throughout education and that they are just not very good. Then they find out that, ‘Maybe I’m not the problem. I can challenge these things’, they get to an employer and are told, ‘No, you can’t challenge these things’. Having to go through that whole process again can impact a young person's mental health.
Another barrier is that if a young person does not have an EHCP, it can be much harder to get anyone to understand that they need support in the first place. Again, going back to the earlier point about late diagnoses, it can have a big impact if young people feel that they are not disabled enough or valid enough to ask for support in the first place. There can sometimes be poor communication and poor implementation of employer support, disability passports shared with other colleagues non-consensually or without them knowing that it has been shared, which can also impact young people.
It is key to highlight that although DPOs and charities can do a really good job on advice, information, employment programmes and peer support, something that is lacking is advocacy. There are not a lot of resources for us in the third sector, and advocacy does not seem to exist outside the third sector. There is a real lack of independent advocacy and support services for young people. That is key, because young people have to rely so much on their parents to do that advocacy, and obviously those who do not have parents to advocate for them are put at a huge disadvantage. We see from the tribunal stats how important all these things are, not only in education but at employment stages. Advocacy is huge for young people.
As disabled people, our life is constantly about having to advocate for ourselves, and it is key to note that this is such a specific time of life for young people. It is stressful for anyone, disability or not, to finish education and move into the real world. Lots of young disabled people go through this awareness of, ‘I’m now the one who has to fight for myself, be in my corner’, and the stakes can be very high if not. I hope you do not think it is too tangential, but the Covid inquiry shows us some key evidence of how high the stakes can be when advocacy is not there.
We know that non-consensual do-not-resuscitates were ordered. We know that 60% of Covid deaths were of disabled people, and although healthcare might seem like a specific context where the stakes are higher, it can be exactly the same in education and employment. We know that suicide rates have increased among young people in recent years. We know that disabled people are disproportionately living in poverty and that that has a huge impact on our mental health. We also know that benefit-related deaths are a real issue. We need to highlight the stakes in this context and that it is not just about it being stressful, finding a new job and facing barriers; these stakes can be really detrimental to a young person's life.
Q49 Lord Carter of Coles: My question is about employers and the types of incentives that could be provided to employers to support them to employ more disabled people and to retain them. The reality is that funding for everything is extremely tight and will continue to be tight. Bethany, you talked about mandatory reporting in an area like that. Could you expand on that? Are there things that could be done? When I read the briefing, I was very struck by Disability Confident and hoped that, with 18,000 employers, this is crackerjack, this must be the answer. Then I read on. It says that one evaluation was that it had no effect at all. Just take us somewhere where you think government could do these things, bearing in mind the financial constraints. We all know that we need more money, but perhaps you can give another angle.
Bethany Bale: On your point about Disability Confident, it absolutely is weak, and comes from the point I made earlier about lack of accountability for employers. Obviously, the law already exists; it is not like we are saying we need to set up a new set of rules to hold employers accountable. Their actions are currently unlawful. Sometimes employers can forget that and, of course, they are not held accountable.
As you have in your briefing, there is no real requirement to employ disabled people under Disability Confident. There is no real accountability with regard to being an inclusive employer. Members of our Disabled Apprentice Network told us that they looked for Disability Confident employers because they thought they would be more inclusive, but their experience was not that at all. Of course, that disheartened and disempowered them. This may be your first job, so it is a really important time. If you are told that an employer is inclusive and then you realise that you cannot do that job because it is not accessible, you tend to assume that you just cannot do the job rather than realise that maybe the employer has unlawful practices.
A great metaphor for Disability Confident in practice sometimes is if an employer called themselves a living wage employer but does not pay their employees the living wage. Then, when employees turn around and say, ‘Excuse me, you’re not paying me a living wage’, they say, ‘You must not be very good at your job’. That can be the experience for lots of young disabled people.
On recommendations for what employers can do, mandatory workforce reporting, as I said earlier, can add not only public accountability but transparency. Reputational risk can mean that employers are more likely to engage. I would highlight the Disability Employment Charter, and I am happy to submit further written evidence on all the recommendations for the Charter, which include employment and pay gap reporting, reforming Access to Work and Disability Confident, and working with disabled people and their representatives. There is a wide variety, and I believe that over 150 employers have already signed up for that programme, so this is a tried and tested Charter that I would recommend.
Lynne Turnbull: I completely agree that mandatory workforce reporting can be done. The Disability Confident scheme, which Bethany has just touched on, needs an overhaul. It feels very much like a tick-box exercise in its current format, because unless you are a Disability Confident leader there is no accountability at all. To get leader status there is a level of process you have to go through to prove that you are an inclusive employer and are employing disabled people, but that is not the same with the committed or the employer status.
The scheme itself needs a complete overhaul, but mandatory reporting is another key area—thinking of it in the context of funding being the issue—to ensure that employers are reporting on the number of disabled people they employ. The Disability Confident scheme could be improved by employers reporting on how many disabled people they are employing and the number of employees they are making reasonable adjustments for, which they are legally obliged to do.
I have nothing else to add, apart from the other side of it, which is how we look at sanctions for employers so that it is not just about sanctions for disabled people who are not in work but how we make employers realise that they have an obligation to make those reasonable adjustments.
The Chair: That is a good point.
Amy Little: I would echo what Bethany and Lynne have testified to: that Disability Confident does not need a wholescale revision, because the principles and building blocks are there. At the moment—you can correct me if I am wrong—you can be Disability Confident level 2 or 3 and still not be employing a disabled person, which defies the point of the programme. The overwhelming feedback on mandatory reporting is that the consultation that was launched and concluded last year but has not moved on since was about individuals and employers supporting the principle of mandatory reporting for organisations employing 250 people or more. We are disappointed that there has been no progress since then, because, again, it seems like it should be an easy win. Scaling up existing employment programmes could be an incentive for employers. As Bethany and Lynne have said, Access to Work is a best-kept secret, but, once it is known about, it is transformational, so that would be a strong recommendation as an incentive from us.
Q50 Lord Willis of Knaresborough: First, can I just say that our three witnesses today have been superb? Some presentations in answer to our questions have been exceptional. Quite frankly, Bethany, I would be worried meeting you at a public meeting, because you would tear pieces out of most of us. However, can I say this? When we have these inquiries, I am desperately keen to find solutions that are applicable and can be presented to government. I have some confidence that we can improve our education with higher level education from our universities, but I am not so sure that we can do it from our colleges. Our FE colleges still require far more improvement, and perhaps that needs greater attention. The area that is most important is, in fact, moving young people from school into work wherever we can and having that transition. Further education is an aid to that rather than a solution.
Apprenticeships have been mentioned today, I think by Bethany, but only as a bypass. The 0.5% apprenticeship levy from 2019 to 2022 raised £3.3 billion that has not been spent. If we are looking for a solution to try to encourage rather than fine employers for their part in taking on board young people with disabilities, apprenticeships are a real answer to that. There is sufficient money in the system, because if it is not spent within 24 months it simply goes back to the Government: it is lost. We are not concentrating at all on persuading employers to use some of that money by providing apprenticeships for disabled people rather than supplying other programmes, it seems to me.
I would like to know what the three of you feel about us fighting that battle and, at the same time, the battle for maintenance for FE students, because you are quite right: FE students so often have to abandon what they are doing because they cannot afford to continue doing it. Perhaps we could put those two things together to try to find out whether I have that totally wrong.
Amy Little: You make a strong point there. We do not have research and figures on that, but I think we should. My caveat would be that there needs to be an element of it that is disability specific. If this was a route to unlocking funding and steering and incentivising employers to do more, it would need to be done as part of a ring-fenced programme with clear targets, and in parallel with the support that can be offered through that kind of confidence building with employers, in order to deliver it. In principle, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Lynne Turnbull: On the employment point, apprenticeships are a really good way of doing that, but I would echo the importance of ring-fencing the funding. We know from other examples that were touched on earlier that Kickstart was a great opportunity for young people to get into employment, but there were still massive barriers to that being fully accessible and inclusive for disabled young people. It is really important that it is ring-fenced, but we also need to remember that every disabled young person is an individual and that an apprenticeship might not be the right route for them. We also need to think more broadly about other ways in which we can support disabled young people into employment. That might be an apprenticeship, but it might be other routes.
Bethany Bale: I would just like to thank Lord Willis for his compliment. It was not my intention to scare you at all.
Baroness Stedman-Scott: It worked.
The Chair: He is not easily scared either.
Bethany Bale: Apprenticeships can be a really useful route for some disabled young people, but I would echo what Lynne has said about making sure that we are not funnelling disabled young people into a specific route. All the points that we have already raised on employment settings are still relevant for apprenticeships. The barriers that young people face such as discrimination, not having adjustments implemented, all those things, still come up for young apprentices. It is key that, if investment is put into apprenticeships, we are making that investment and making employment more inclusive. If you would like further written evidence, I will happily send a report published last February by our Disabled Apprentice Network on getting it right for disabled apprentices; it focuses on apprenticeship issues that need tackling.
Q51 Baroness Stedman-Scott: A speedy last question for the three of you. What one policy intervention would like beyond all others?
Bethany Bale: I had a list of three.
Baroness Stedman-Scott: Just one.
Bethany Bale: Earlier intervention: removing the barriers to support in education, earlier diagnosis, better careers advice, all the things we mentioned before that so often make it too late for young people when they get to transition.
Lynne Turnbull: I have lots, but perhaps we can follow up them in writing. If I could pick one, it would be a clear programme of funded training to support individuals and employers. I will sneak this in, but it is not a second one: training should also cover the advocacy aspects. It is really important that young people have advocates who can speak up for them when they do not know their rights.
Amy Little: Probably to repeat what I have said, it is tailored, personalised, disability-specific programmes and support, rather than retrofitting or adding aspects to existing programmes.
There is one more, sanctions, which I hoped to talk about earlier but was not able to. Very briefly, we have strong concerns that the sanctions that were announced under the Government's recent plans might disproportionately affect young people, particularly young disabled people in transition. Research for the Child Poverty Action Group by Dr David Webster—I am not sure if he submitted evidence—showed that young people aged 16 to 24 are most likely to be sanctioned, and they account for 14% of sanctions. Nearly all those sanctions, 95%, arise from failing to attend mandatory interviews.
Something that has come through strongly in our research, particularly with young people, is a lack of awareness of the support on offer on reasonable adjustments. Rather than the sanctions-based language from jobcentres and employment advisers, there should be more focus on removing the barriers that many disabled people have. Getting that right could be key to those people, particularly those who might not be accessing further education or university. People tell us that they do not know that adjustments such as changing the times of meetings or doing things remotely are available.
So we would like to see a two-way piece for claimants: that there are not just sanctions and the claimant contract for individuals but the offer for young disabled people. We would like to see a real offer and a guarantee of reasonable adjustments at jobcentre meetings, access to a work coach and a disability employment adviser, and access to work in a timely manner. It is a two-way street, so there is not the pressure and the prejudice against young disabled people. It is an offer of support, and that will build the confidence for young people.
The Chair: Thanks very much. I am sorry to rush you, but I am conscious that you might have other things to do and we only asked you to stay until 4 pm. We also have votes, and when the voting bell goes we have to close the meeting, and I would not want to make you wait 20 minutes before we came back and finished.
As Phil says, it has been an exceptionally helpful session, and it is clear that each of you, in the day jobs that you do, are extremely experienced and conscientious. It has been good to benefit from your experience and your wisdom. If there is anything you have not said, including the recommendations we did not give you time to give, do let us have them, because at the end of the day, as Phil said, it is the recommendations that the Government will respond to as much as the report, so we are keen to get them as strong as possible. Thank you very much for your time. To those of you online, thank you—you will probably be offline soon—and to Bethany, here in person, thank you too. Thank you, everybody.
