Disability History Month 2024: Opening pathways to work

The theme of this year’s UK Disability History Month (14 November – 20 December) is employment and livelihoods for disabled people.

We wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on and share with you some insights from our learning programmes at The MERL which are designed to equip disabled young people with work skills and professional experience, while supporting their needs every step of the way.

Barriers to work for disabled people

Young disabled people encounter barriers both during education and after leaving school. To learn more about these, we spoke with Kim Mead, Career Lead for Special Educational Needs at nearby Addington School.

The biggest barrier that Kim sees for young disabled people is low employer confidence. Kim pointed out that many employers become preoccupied with ‘getting things wrong’ or failing to fully accommodate a disabled person’s needs. While every adjustment should be made, these concerns can come at the expense of seeing and rewarding a disabled young person’s potential.

In fact, Kim said that inaccessibility emerges much earlier into the hiring process. Many disabled people struggle to complete the long forms and interview arrangements that are standard in traditional interview processes. While disabled applicants can sometimes access reasonable adjustments, this depends on the applicant feeling comfortable enough to disclose their disability. Many disabled young people just want to be considered in line with the requirements of the job, rather than receiving any different treatment.

Kim identified that hiring software and automation worsens these issues. Many neurodivergent people leave school without formal qualifications, which can make CVs look ‘weak’ in comparison to other education leavers. If CVs go through a system that looks for qualifications, these young people will immediately be rejected, despite the quality of the rest of their application.

Building employment skills

One initiative we run for SEND young people is supported work placements. These placements give students the chance to experience independence and develop transferable skills in a professional environment. Students learn to take and follow instructions, handle situations where things may not always go to plan, and reflect on their learning and skills development.

We complement this work with the Work Ready Days partnership that we run with Addington School. Addington students join us to experience the different jobs in the museum, engage with our artefacts, and ask questions about what working in museums involves. Students, including those with profound and complex needs, participate in the museum through multisensory approaches, combining touch, sound, light and smell.

The hands-on and sensory-focused Work Ready Day at The MERL was thoughtfully designed, creating a warm, inclusive, and nurturing environment for the students. The activities were engaging and tailored perfectly to their needs, making the experience both enjoyable and educational. It was wonderful to see the students actively participating, exploring, and connecting with the exhibits in such an interactive way.

Diana, teacher at Addington School

One important aspect of this work has been creating an inclusive and accessible museum environment. A longstanding example of this has been our work with purpleSTARS, an inclusive research team of disabled- and non-disabled people who acted as consultants for creating multisensory experiences in the museum. purpleSTARS’ work included the creation of our Sensory Cow, which prompts you to use senses like sounds and touch to explore where your food come from, and our VR quad bike, combining a static quad bike with a VR headset to create a 360-video shepherding experience.

Co-production with disabled people continues today. On Mondays, The MERL is home to Reading Mencap’s ‘Hear our Voice’ group. The group meets to gather and connect, share their views, give feedback, and collaborate on museum projects. These have been many and varied, but most importantly led and steered by the group themselves. Examples have included gardening and growing programmes and exhibitions (like ‘Hear Our Voice in the Countryside’) that share their views and present meaningful objects accessibly, using visual symbols, spoken labels and soundscapes.

What we have learned?

• Ensure that contributions are valued every step of the way and shown in any final outputs. For example: alongside the VR quad bike, we displayed information about purpleSTARS’ work and the immense contributions of the young people who made it possible. This rewards and recognises young people’s work but also inspires others.
• Be bespoke and prioritise the needs of the young people involved. A ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is destined to fail, because it would not be responsive to the specific needs of different users.
• Reduce overheads and keep communications as focused as possible. By streamlining how we communicate and organisation our work, we can reserve the maximum amount of time for what matters most: creating engaging, meaningful, and personalised museum experiences for the young people we work with.

Thank you to Kim Mead and the staff of Addington School for supporting this article.

Interested in our schools sessions and learning opportunities for SEN students? Learn more on our Schools pages or reach out to Phillippa Heath.