The head of a college for disabled students warns that policies must recognise the very diverse challenges facing people with special needs
“I’m the principal of a specialist college. Our students have a range of physical disabilities, and some have learning difficulties as well. The youngest pupil at our school is seven years old, and we can cater for students in the college up to age 25. Most are wheelchair users, though not all. It’s a really wide range of special needs to cater for.
We get most of our funding from a range of agencies: for young people with learning difficulties and disabilities, the education department currently tends to remain in charge through to age 25. One thing we appreciate about the existing funding arrangements is their stability. That looks like it might be about to change, though, with local authorities taking over the management of our funding from the education department’s agencies next year.
Handing down funding powers to local authorities as part of the government’s localism drive might make a lot of sense in many cases, since councils will certainly be more aware of the needs of local areas than Whitehall. But because so many of our students are residential, we serve a national market, so devolution can make things difficult.
Dealing with dozens of local authorities instead of a single national funding agency makes things quite a bit more complicated, and I think that’s something that’s been rather overlooked. And since local authorities are under a lot of financial pressure, and will all have different ways of allocating funds, it’s very hard to predict how our funding settlement will look around the corner. We’re independent, so if we saw a large enough drop in student numbers, we’d have to close.
To be fair to the civil servants who oversaw the change, it looks as if they’ve made a real effort to cushion its financial impact. For the first year after the change, they’ve guaranteed funding for at least the number of students in the current year, which has given us breathing space to adjust and downsize if necessary. This was really better than anything we’d hoped for. I’d even go as far as to describe it as generous.
The amount of money involved wasn’t huge, and the risk wasn’t that the department wouldn’t have deep enough pockets to protect us. It was more that they could have overlooked our problems and forgotten about us, due to our specialist nature.
This is what I see as a danger in a lot of the areas we work in, and there are still many challenges ahead. One thing we have to think about at the college is where our students go after they leave. When the government closed the Remploy factories [subsidised to employ disabled staff], it made clear that it wasn’t a fan of separate, supported employment. Ministers said they wanted to see disabled people move into ‘mainstream’ work and be helped to find jobs that their disability doesn’t rule out.
I don’t think anyone who works here has a problem with that in theory, but in reality our students have such complex disabilities that it isn’t a realistic option for a lot of them. Many who move out go to live in supported housing, so it’s difficult to see how they’d move into unsupported work.
For some young people with disabilities, apprenticeships could be an option, provided the necessary support is in place. But there aren’t really any clear guidelines in place for how we as a special college work with the apprenticeship agencies that administer the system. It seems like the government just hasn’t got round to drawing these guidelines up yet. Civil servants should really make sure we’re not left out of things like this.
I also think the whole policy of simply rejecting supported employment may be bit one-size-fits-all. ‘Mainstream’ employment might be better for some people with less taxing physical needs; but for many who need more serious help, it’s impossible. The more you work with disabled people – particularly young people – the more you realise that it’s a fallacy to consider them as a homogenous group. They all have strikingly different needs, and what works for one might not work for another.
On some level, the government definitely understands that disabled people have different requirements, and it applies that thinking in some areas of its policy – such as the personalisation agenda and personal care budgets.
However, in other areas of policy, it isn’t as good at applying the principle. I think if there’s one thing civil servants need to keep an eye on, it’s making sure that they keep the variety and individuality of people’s needs at the front of their minds, and are more consistent about applying that understanding when they develop policies.”