Employment Policies for Disabled People in Eighteen Countries: A Review

Thornton, P.; Lunt, N.,
Social Policy Research Unit, University of New York,
1997

With the shift to active labour market measures, labour market authorities have become increasingly important providers of training and placement services, as well as of financial incentives. Labour market authorities commonly give preference to disabled people by waiving eligibility criteria (such as maximum age in training measures for young people), by extending the duration of measures (such as training or financial subsidies) or by giving them priority access (for example, to training grants).

Countries vary in their attachment to specialist or mainstream employment services. In Sweden and Australia for example, specialist services are intended only for people who need special resources in order to find, obtain, and retain employment and for whom mainstream services are not sufficient. Specialist provision is stronger in those countries with traditions of assessment and classification of disability and of registration. That said, countries appear to follow a similar developmental pattern: separate, often institutionally-based, provision is replaced by mainstream provision, which in turn is modified by the introduction of specialist staff.

Alternatives to publicly provided support services are emerging. Private and non-governmental organisations, including disability organisations, now provide counselling, training and placement services, independently or under contract. Innovations include agencies for temporary work; in Spain, for example, ONCE runs its own agency to place disabled people. Local independent agencies may attract the co-operation of employers which public services have been unable to reach. State-run agencies are themselves diversifying; in Germany, for example, specialist integration services have begun to provide tailor-made support to disabled people with particular difficulties fording employment. A pattern emerges of small, localised agencies specialising in services for people with particular impairments, notably for people with learning difficulties.

The proliferation of providers and fragmentation of responsibility for employment support services have highlighted the need for co-ordination on the ground.

Guidance, training and placement are employment services which have proved most difficult to describe adequately within this study. It has not been possible to gain a comprehensive understanding of on-the-ground provision of services within individual countries. Rather, reliance had to be placed on available policy statements from which it is difficult to extract the more interpersonal dimensions of service activities. (For example, although a statement may note that a person is 'assessed' for training and guidance, more detailed on-the-ground studies would be necessary to determine the actual process of assessment and the nature of the user/ professional relationship.)

There is a move towards making training more responsive to the needs of employers and the market. A mirror development has been to make the providers of the service more competitive, as in Sweden where the training authority has moved from being a grant-receiving body to a revenue-generating one in competition with the other training organisations. In some countries including Australia, UK, and Sweden, we see the emergence of a 'quasi-market' with public, private and non-governmental providers competing to provide training services. On a much wider scale, this development is related to the rise of the contract culture and post-Fordist restructuring.

We note an emerging trend in favour of on-the-job training, in preference to training as a forerunner to placement. As we discuss below, Canada, Australia, USA, and the UK have policies to encourage integrated employment training in the form of various supported employment models.

Concern is expressed in some countries about the level of qualification of staff engaged in delivering training. Some countries (such as the USA) make staff training a separate and identifiable component of their vocational training programme. There is an awareness of the need to retrain staff in line with a changing emphasis of service delivery, for example from sheltered to supported employment.

The study identified a growing emphasis on the philosophy of supported employment in Australia, USA, Canada and the UK. This approach to employment intends to offer competitive employer-paid work and continuous on-the-job support to those who need it in order to maintain employment.

Supported employment was first established and developed in the USA context, where it developed as an alternative service delivery model to traditional rehabilitation programmes which were unable fully to assist severely disabled people to achieve mainstream, integrated employment. Supported employment is akin to 'a national civil rights movement on the part of people with severe disabilities who have been excluded, devalued and disenfranchised on the basis of their lack of vocational competence'¹. In Australia it was promoted as part of a movement away from segregated employment services. In both the USA and Australia, supported employment is built into legislation and public funding programmes.

Supported or assisted employment initiatives are also proliferating across the European Union. In most EU countries it is inaccurate to talk about a supported employment policy; rather there are initiatives, the origins of which are diverse. Some have been promoted by NGOs, some by state-run placement services, while others have emerged out of traditional sheltered employment provision. The European Commission's HORIZON programme has been a stimulus to initiatives on the ground. Certain countries, such as Austria and the UK, have incorporated supported employment within their strategic policies. In other countries local initiatives are emerging without a coherent national framework. There is no single model of supported employment and often different approaches to supported employment operate side-byside. The need to co-ordinate approaches is beginning to be recognised.

How best to resource supported employment initiatives is a debate across many countries. There are few evaluations of the cost-effectiveness and outcomes of supported employment.

EMP/SKILLS - Skills and Employability Department