Residential ‘Camps’ For Disabled People To Train For Jobs

I've just heard about this Government panel report, published in July. It looks at the possibility of Residential training provision for disabled people who are unemployed and looking for work.

Apparently the Government plans to set up these 'camps' from September 2014 if the review is successful.

Now, the idea of sending several of 'us lot' off to one place to learn how to get ourselves a job when there is no need to segregate us in this way sounds more than a little like something the Nazis would have loved.

Readers, special schools are a choice every parent and disabled child should have. Remploy factories were a choice for segregated paid employment- they should still be here, but, surprise, surprise, they're too expensive.

Residential care homes are a choice that should be available to severely disabled people when their parent carers are no longer physically able to care for them. Day care centres provide opportunities for disabled people to do suitable activities while socialising with other disabled people- a choice that they and their parents should have open to them.

But readers, residential employment training is one step too far for me.

The report says that being away from a home setting while learning skills to find employment would be a good thing as home circumstances may be stressful or parents may be over-protective.

However, disabled people who live at home need a very high level of support with personal care. Personally, I would not be comfortable with anyone but my parents providing this personal care for as long as my parents live and are physically able to do so. I'm sure most of my friends, and many other disabled people, would agree.

Don't non-disabled young people have stressful home environments too? Don't they have over-protective parents? Yet where do they do their job skills training? Down the Job Centre for a few hours a week.

There are many reasons why disabled people don't work. But these reasons have nothing to do with the fact that we haven't previously had access to residential training. They have more to do with the difficulty of finding employers willing to make reasonable adjustments for us so that we can have our disability-related needs met in the workplace.

Or, surprise, surprise, the fact that we are simply too affected by our illness or disability to consider working.

Personally, I hope that when we come out of these 'camps' we're going to have suitable skills to work in a mainstream workplace, should any non-disabled employer be so kind as to want to give one of 'us lot' a job.

So why do we need to be segregated to be trained? We can understand the tips given at the Job Centre, you know. And if we do need those explained to us in simpler language, if we need them signed to us or written in Braille, why can't the Job Centre provide these services? Are we really that much of a disruption to others who are able to work at a 'normal' pace?

Too expensive, I hear you say? Well, are these 'camps' going to be any cheaper?

Put aside our discomfort at having strangers providing personal care for just a minute. Has the Government panel considered the cost of providing overnight carers? Many parent carers, husbands/wives or partners willingly provide care to disabled adults for free. Why not keep Remploy factories, and the choice to work at them, open using the money that would be spent on overnight carers at these 'camps?'

The report recognises the importance of the "peer support" that can come from being with other disabled people. So we wouldn't stand out at these 'camps.' Not standing out is truly very important. Not standing out can truly help a person's self-confidence and self-esteem. Disabled people who use any such camps might make friends for life. And friends with whom you share something so important in common are truly valuable. I am the first to recognise this important fact.

However, as well as not standing out, we would all feel unwanted by mainstream society at these 'camps.' We would, I can well imagine, share the emotions of orphans living in orphanages or of adults living in refugee camps, or of all those millions, most of whom so tragically lost their lives, in concentration camps.

Generations of disabled people already felt unwanted by their parents and mainstream society when they were sent to institutions. Later generations already felt unwanted by teachers when they were sent to special schools, before the choice to go to mainstream schools was opened to us and our parents.

We already know that non-disabled people don't want to employ us in their workplaces because we look too different/are always ill/need too much help/are too expensive.

Now they tell us we have to be locked away from our families and from mainstream society at yet another stage in our lives because they don't want to train us to work either? It's the straw that broke the wheelchair's seat.

And as for this sentence: "In the vast majority of cases, the type and severity of a person's impairment/health condition has little bearing on their ability to secure and sustain employment," which translates as "Most people can work and hold down a job quite well no matter what their disability is or how severely it affects them," all I can say is: 'Are they having alaugh?'