The Snowden Trust – Written evidence (YDP0039)

Access to work for young disabled people - Lords Committee call for evidence

About us

This submission is made by the Snowdon Trust.

The Snowdon Trust breaks down barriers for Disabled Students to achieve their education and employability goals. Our work is delivered across three priority areas:

Financial Awards

Financial Awards to students which reduce inequalities in the cost of higher and further education, and which accelerate the progress of future Disabled Leaders

Disabled Leaders Network

The Disabled Leaders Network. A leadership forum for Disabled Students, Graduates and Professionals to connect, collaborate and develop skills on themes around Leadership and Disability

Information and research

Information, advice and signposting which extends the reach of our impact and sharing all of our expertise and knowledge to support campaigning and advocacy on behalf of Disabled Students.

We have submitted information to this call for evidence based on what the students we support tell us. They do this through their regular financial award reporting, anecdotally when we meet them at events, and through the research we fund.

General

1) What barriers do young disabled people face when leaving education and entering the job market and workplace? Does this differ between different conditions or disabilities, and if so, how?

• While in education, particularly in higher education, students can receive support for disability-related study costs – or reasonable adjustments - from Student Finance through the Disabled Students Allowance. This ends the day a student graduates.
• While in employment, employees can ensure they get support for the reasonable adjustments they need from the Department for Work and Pensions, through the Access to Work scheme. This begins once an employee is in a role.
• What happens if a young disabled person needs some of that support to be able to search and apply for roles? There is a gap in provision.
• Having gone through a very rigorous application process for DSA, why must a disabled person do this again to apply for Access to Work? Is this not inefficient duplication of work for Government departments, and an additional – and stressful – bureaucratic burden on disabled people?

• Applying for your first job is a daunting experience for almost all young people. Adding in the fact that you must also declare a disability at some point during the process adds immeasurable stress to the process.
• Some graduates say there is a noticeable difference in interview success rates depending on whether they declare a disability in a job application. They say they get far more interview offers if they DON’T declare a disability during the initial recruitment process.
• Others say they prefer not to declare a disability because they don’t want tokenistic interview offers to meet employers’ internal diversity targets.
• Some students express concerns about finding employment in their grant reports to us. When we ask to share their stories, they often ask us to remove this part of their story for fear it will jeopardise their job search when recruiters invariably search their online profiles.

• The impetus is placed on the disabled employee to explain the reasonable adjustments they need to be put in place for them to be able to do their job.
• A new graduate or first-time employee who has never spent any time in a workplace environment is unlikely to know or be able to articulate what reasonable adjustments they need.
• A new graduate or first-time employee who has never spent any time in a workplace environment is unlikely to be confident enough to explain what reasonable adjustments they need unless invited and encouraged to do so.

• Some recruiting teams show a complete lack of basic understanding and empathy.
• A blind graduate told us he was left in a room alone to complete an interview test on a pc with no screen reader software.
• Students with invisible disabilities can face greater problems if employers lack understanding. This is particularly true for neurodiverse young people. Many are terrified at the idea of applying for jobs where they feel they will have little choice but to mask their difficulties.

• This lack of understanding and empathy doesn’t just come from direct employers.
• Harris was a freelance Graphic Designer but his income from it was too unstable because he kept losing contracts from customers who said they did not know how to work with a deaf person. He retrained in computer science.

• If you are a young person who needs accessible accommodation, you are likely to be i) still living in your family home with parents, or ii) receiving housing benefit to be able to afford the additional cost of accessible accommodation. To be eligible for housing benefit, you must have been living in your Local Authority area for three years. That means that if you need support to cover the cost of accommodation, you cannot move out of your Local Authority. This causes a massive barrier for any young person wishing to move for work and therefore limits their career opportunities.
• In London in particular, the scarcity of accessible accommodation and the challenge of accessible travel on public transport is preventing talented young disabled people being able to apply for, or accept job offers.
• Freya had no trouble getting job interviews but was forced to decide which job offer to accept based on the accessibility of travel and accessible housing, and not on the merits of the job itself.

• The disability employment gap reduces proportionately to the level of educational attainment. Put simply, Disabled People find they must be more qualified than their non-disabled peers to be able to compete in the jobs market. This barrier is two-fold.
• It demonstrates that Disabled People almost certainly experience bias during the recruitment process.
• Disabled young people feel they must achieve higher education levels to compete for jobs. Adding a master's to your undergraduate degree for example, is a costly undertaking, putting young disabled people at additional financial disadvantage.

• Most standard online jobs boards and recruitment sites are not accessible for screen readers. This excludes Disabled People who are qualified for roles because they cannot access the information about them.

a) How far do barriers to young disabled people accessing other public services, such as health and care services, present a barrier to young disabled people accessing the workplace?

• Long waiting lists prevent young people receiving formal diagnoses but without these, it is difficult or impossible to access support.

• Some health services place restrictions on support which cause huge barriers. We receive grant applications for powerchairs from students who report that because they can take some (a small number) steps unaided, they do not qualify for a powerchair from the NHS. They also do not qualify for a manual chair from the NHS because they cannot demonstrate sufficient physical ability to self-propel a chair. This leaves them in a situation where they cannot physically leave their own home without additional support. Inflexible and unsupportive health care rules cause real barriers.

• Young people are now required to stay in education until the age of 18 but support services like transport to schools or college still end at 16, putting families in difficult positions.
• Issues like this make it much harder for young people to complete their education either at all, or to the standard they are capable of, and therefore limit their ability to compete in the job market.

• Barriers accessing health and care services are likely to lead to increased absence from work through ill-health or pain from poorly managed conditions, this causes much stress, both from poor health episodes and the concerns this leads to about job security.
• Many employers are inflexible about extended periods of sickness due to long-term health conditions, or the need to be able to prevent this through the adoption of flexible working patterns.

Scope of the inquiry

2) We have not focused this inquiry specifically on the experiences of young people with an Education, Health, and Care plan when they leave education and enter employment. What are your thoughts on this approach, and are there particular benefits or drawbacks to it? What other focused approaches could the inquiry take?

• Since many disabled students do not have any diagnosis until they reach University, and some not even then, it seems sensible – vital in fact - to take this less-focused approach to ensure it is not exclusionary to a wider disabled experience.

3) How effectively do education systems provide careers advice, guidance and support which meet the needs and career aspirations of young disabled people? How could this be improved, and what examples of good practice are there in the UK and abroad?

• We have heard far too many stories from disabled young people or students advised not to pursue education and career aspirations felt to be outside of their capability. In some of these cases, simple adjustments like dyslexia support software quickly and simply eliminate the problems caused by lack of diagnosis and further cemented by bad advice.
• There seems to be little or no tailored careers advice provided for Disabled Students. There are so many things that could make job search easier for them, including advice on when and how to declare a disability; what reasonable adjustments might look like in the workplace; what funding is available to support reasonable adjustments (for their own sake, and because they may well be educating their future employers); how to manage difficult/sensitive conversations with employers; what are your rights under the Equality Act.

a) Do staff in schools and other education settings providing careers guidance and advice have the appropriate training and resources to support the needs and aspirations of young disabled people?

• The feedback we hear from students and graduates suggests almost certainly, no. And, worse, sometimes that advice is belittling and inaccurate.
• Hope, who has cerebral palsy, completed her undergraduate degree and her master's and is now working in counterterrorism. She was told to “aim lower. University is not for people like you.”

b) How do far do staff in education settings engage with employment support services and schemes such as Access to Work, supported internships, or disability employment advisors in order to support young disabled people?

4) How far do employment support mechanisms such as Access to Work or Disability Employment Advisors meet the needs of young disabled people entering the job market for the first time? How could these services be improved?

• Neither students nor Employers know enough about Access to Work. Greater awareness in the first instance is key.
• There are extremely long wait times which cause unnecessary delays in the provision of adjustments and support.
• Reiterating the point that joined up support processes that follow through different life stages more seamlessly would be tremendously helpful, it can feel degrading to be applying for another resource which means another set of assessments that focus on the things ‘I can’t do’ or make me ‘different’. It only perpetuates the feeling of having to be accommodated, being a burden, or a problem, despite the value-add disabled people bring to workplaces in myriad ways.

a) What is the first point that a young disabled person would engage with an employment support scheme, and how are such schemes communicated to young disabled people?

5) What are young disabled people’s experiences of the transition from education-based support to employment-related support? Do young disabled people face barriers to accessing support during this transition? Could these services be better linked, and if so, how?

There should be something that links DSA to Access to Work.

• Continued access to services that are just as important for accessing work, e.g., technology and software, BSL (British Sign Language) interpretation etc.
• Coaching and support for job seekers, recognising the specific barriers and biases they face
• Sharing information between different Government departments about diagnosis and adjustment needs so there is no need to constantly describe challenges and produce evidence again and again.

Public Services as good employers

6) How accessible are careers in public services to young disabled people when they are first entering the job market? Are there public services which very effectively recruit disabled people, and services where significant improvement is needed?

a) What could public services employers learn from best practice elsewhere, including overseas, about recruiting and retaining young disabled people? What are the barriers to implementing such good practice?

Support for employers

7) How effective are government programmes which support or encourage employers to employ disabled people, particularly young disabled people? Does this differ by condition or disability? How could they be improved?

a)    What steps could be taken to improve awareness and uptake of relevant government support schemes?

• Better understanding of the Access to Work programme. The cost of reasonable adjustments is likely prohibitive below a certain threshold, so employers need to know there is support available before discounting recruitment of disabled employees.

b) What actions could employers be taking without Government support? What barriers prevent them doing so?

• There is a real drive among big employers to do more to support diversity in their employee communities. The more that all employers can see evidence that this brings genuine business benefits, the easier it is to drive.
• If HR and recruitment processes focused on a more personalised induction approach – formally recognising that one gets the best out of any employee when they seek to understand and support that person’s preferred ways of working, onboarding Disabled employees becomes less about dealing with something outside of the norm, but the simple process of inclusive policies and practices that support employee recruitment and retention.

Enforcement of the rights of disabled people in the workplace

8) How effectively are the rights of disabled people upheld and enforced in the workplace? What barriers do young disabled people face in accessing the support (including legal support) that they need and are entitled to? How could enforcement mechanisms be improved?

a) Is the present legal framework sufficient, in theory and in practice, in dealing with disability discrimination faced by young disabled people transitioning from education to work?

21 September 2023