What exactly is meant by Supported employment?
Supported employment is work paid at the market rate for the job, for people who have a disability. It is a job in an ordinary workplace in the community; It is work that a non-disabled person would do. The new employee will be supported by a specialist agency that has experience is training jobseekers who may need additional support to achieve the employer’s standards in the early day of their employment.
The Model
Following the development of the person’s Vocational Profile, which is designed in discussion with them and the people who value them, the agency will initiate a job search to seek the most appropriate job match for the person’s skills and interests.
A Job Coach, who will have been trained to use a technique known
widely as Systematic Instruction, provides the on-job training. A
Job Analysis will help the Job Coach acquire the necessary knowledge
of the job.
Gradually as the new employee gains skills and attains the employer’s
expected standard of performance, the Job Coach will “fade”
support, usually first identifying in the working environment another
staff member as a ‘natural support’.
Ideally, support will be available for the employee and the employer for a non-time limited period; however the method of funding for support influences its duration.
History
Agencies specialising in this work have sprung up all over Wales since 1984, through the ideological influence of the All Wales Learning Disability Strategy. In the 1970s, in the United States of America, Mark Gold pioneered Systematic Instruction for people with a severe learning disability, an approach known as ‘Try Another Way’ and put the responsibility for the success of the training squarely on the shoulders of the trainer, not the learner. This philosophical shift valued the learner and led to a different approach to training people who have a learning disability.
Funding
Supported Employment also includes the Government’s WORKSTEP provision. Some of the supported employment agencies in Wales are also WORKSTEP providers and have contracts with Jobcentre Plus. A review of the provision of work-focussed programmes for disabled people is currently being undertaken by the Department of Work and Pensions. The majority of supported employment agencies are funded by a variety of sources. These include: Social Services Departments, Health Bodies and charitable bodies and trusts: for example the Big Lottery or Children in Need. The funding of this model which successfully provides employment opportunities for people who have a learning disability is an ongoing sources of uncertainty.
The Welsh Association of Supported Employment Agencies has a Trustee who feeds into Learning Disability Wales on behalf of Wales ASE.
