THE NATIONAL DEAF CHILDREN'S SOCIETY (NDCS) – WRITTEN EVIDENCE (YUN0009)

Youth Unemployment Committee inquiry

In summary:

• Deaf young people are reporting additional barriers to trying to find work. This may be exacerbated by social measures in many work places (e.g. face masks can create barriers to communication for deaf young people)
• Issues are reported with the accessibility of jobcentre services. This can make accessing employment support schemes such as Kickstart more challenging.
• More needs to be done to improve the awareness of employers (e.g. through putting more resources into the Disability Confident scheme), many of whom are not meeting their legal requirements to put in place reasonable adjustments.
• There is insufficient support provided through the education system to prepare deaf young people – a lack of tailored careers information and insufficient focus on the skills employers are looking for

The National Deaf Children's Society believes in giving young deaf people a voice. We asked members of our Young People's Advisory Board and Young Campaigners Network[1] to submit their lived experienced of looking for work and of employment and careers support to the inquiry.

To do this we created an accessible space where deaf young people would feel comfortable sharing their experiences of unemployment and their ideas about how things could be improved.

We created a focus group made up of deaf young people aged 17-24 who had had a range of employment and unemployment experiences. The meeting on the 5th May was held on zoom, with a BSL interpreter and palantypist writing captions live.

We invited an illustrator along (Amber Anderson) who captured those experiences live, and illustrated the below during the meeting, as evidence for your inquiry.

Youth Unemployment Evidence Session: Wednesday 5th May 2021 (illustration text)

Personal Experience of Finding Work:

• The feeling of having to find support for yourself... (negative)
• Advocating for yourself despite employer expectations
• The worry of internalised ableism vs company discrimination in pursuing a career
• Covid-19 has put barriers in place for being able to access support options for employment.

There are extra barriers to finding work as a young deaf person:

• Telephone interviews
• Cost of accessibility
• Liability vs Access to Work
• Accessibility nightmare
• ‘Covert Ableism’
• “It’s horrible to have the feeling that employers are having to work harder for you.”

Employment:

• Deaf role models, mentors and examples of experience
• These are helpful to deaf young people to understand the options available
• Jobcentres: Difficult because of services only available by phone
• “shouldn’t take a fight to enable email communication”
• “the process was complicated and showed there was no deaf awareness”

Government:

• More awareness from employers - deaf awareness needed.
• Push the accreditation (Disability Confident) to be more visible and present for companies
• More accessible Jobcentre interface needed.

Education:

• Key skills learning is the most valuable (e.g. careers advisors, speech therapists helping students prepare for interview speaking etc).
• Halt on careers experience due to Covid-19.
• There have been positive experiences of opportunity prior to the pandemic
• No disability support until university level of education

Members of our Young People's Advisory Board and Young Campaigners Network would also be happy to give oral evidence to the committee.

Separately from this submission The National Deaf Children's Society has inputted and worked with the Youth Employment Group Disability Sub-group whose submission it fully supports.

7th May 2021