Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables and boxes
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction Working futures: disabled people, employment policy and social inclusion
- Part One Work, welfare and social inclusion: challenges, concepts and questions
- Part Two The current policy environment
- Part Three Towards inclusive policy futures
- Index
- Also available from The Policy Press
fifteen - Enabling futures for people with learning difficulties? Exploring employment realities behind the policy rhetoric
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables and boxes
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction Working futures: disabled people, employment policy and social inclusion
- Part One Work, welfare and social inclusion: challenges, concepts and questions
- Part Two The current policy environment
- Part Three Towards inclusive policy futures
- Index
- Also available from The Policy Press
Summary
Introduction
In this chapter, we contemplate the current nature of employment for people with learning difficulties and aim to envisage an enabling future. We critically consider some of the contemporary employment policies and programmes in Britain, make reference to a recent study of work experiences of people with learning difficulties and unpack the discourses and philosophies that underpin some of the interventions of professionals and policy makers.
First, we outline what we mean when we use the term ‘learning difficulties’. Second, we explore how employment is considered in the 2001 White Paper, Valuing people. Third, we critically examine the impact of supported employment and its relationship with normalisation. Fourth, we analyse the concept of ‘real jobs’ and the service culture in which many people with learning difficulties are confined. Fifth, we assess the involvement of disabled professionals and organisations of disabled people in the employment of people with learning difficulties. This is an important point of consideration if the political and policy landscape of disability and employment is to be dictated by disabled people and their organisations. We end with a number of questions to further debate.
Learning difficulties: a social phenomenon
What should concern us is the mystifying fact that so many social scientists … do not regard mental retardation as a social and cultural phenomenon. I say mystifying, because nothing in the probabilistic world of social scientific reality is more certain than the assertion that mental retardation is a socio-cultural problem through and through. (Dingham, 1968, p 76)
The term ‘learning difficulties’ describes people who have been labelled at some point in their lives as requiring specialist ‘mental handicap/learning disability services’ (Walmsley, 1993). We opt for this term, instead of other synonyms such as ‘mental handicap’, ‘mental impairment’, ‘developmental disabilities’ or ‘learning disabilities’, because it is the term preferred by many in the self-advocacy movement (Goodley, 2000). As one member of the British movement puts it:
If you put ‘people with learning difficulties’ then they know that people want to learn and to be taught how to do things. (Quoted in Sutcliffe and Simons, 1993, p 23)
Understanding what we mean by ‘learning difficulties’ is crucial to our analysis, primarily because people who have been assigned this label face particular employment barriers.
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- Information
- Working Futures?Disabled People, Policy and Social Inclusion, pp. 219 - 232Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2005