Blog and News

Bill Scott highlights some of the key strands coming out of the Inclusion Scotland webinar on DRILL funded projects in Scotland

The webinar centred around the experience and need for co-production in research, highlighting that disabled people should no longer be the subject of research, but equal partners in it. The ‘Match Me’ project explored social housing lettings for disabled people, hearing their experiences as well as working with housing providers to find out about their […]

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Mutual Benefits – The Potential of Disabled People as Foster Carers

There is a huge shortage of foster carers in England. We sought to find out why Disabled people are not being asked to help fill this recruitment gap of 8,500 people. The University of Worcester worked alongside Shaping Our Lives Service User and Disabled Persons’ Network and the Foster Care Co-operative agency to look in-depth […]

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DRILL in Wales: The Impact so Far

Jody Mellor reflects on the learning for Wales, as the DRILL project begins to draw to a close, and introduces a series of webinars to share some key learning from the projects. Historically, research on disability has rarely included people with lived experience. Disabled people have been excluded from participating in research about our own […]

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Energy impairment and disability inclusion – report by the Chronic Illness Inclusion Project

Catherine Hale If you ask someone living with a debilitating chronic illness if they consider themselves to be disabled, you often get a “yes but, no but” kind of reply. If you dig deeper, you may find their ambivalence is not so much because they see disability in negative terms. It’s often because they don’t […]

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Why are disabled people seemingly unexpected in the legal profession and what can we do to create a culture of inclusion and access?

Natasha Hirst from the Legally Disabled project reflects on the findings of the project, and last month’s conference, about disabled people working in the legal profession.

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Blog: Looking at the effectiveness of Accessibility Plans in secondary schools

DRILL has published the research carried out by the Alliance for Inclusive Education (Allfie) into the effectiveness of Accessibility Plans in secondary schools. Dr Armineh Soorenian, who carried out the research, tells us about what she found and some of the stories she heard. I travelled across England and conducted 12 focus groups consisting of […]

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Blog: DRILL welcomes Sue Bott as new programme manager

It’s a fascinating time to be joining DRILL as the new programme manager. The ambition was to develop and implement a project which would make a real and practical difference to disabled people’s lives, both now and in the future. The programme has produced a broad range of reports and toolkits which will benefit disabled […]

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Blog: Disabled researchers are a challenge to Higher Eduction sector

In academic studies involving disabled people, all researchers are equal but some – it seems – are more equal than others.

Disabled peer researchers involved in projects have reported that their lived experience is not fully appreciated and that they sometimes felt like an inferior bolt-on – even though the projects were funded by a user-led programme.

Those feelings emerged from a study funded and written as part of the DRILL programme.

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Blog: Supporting people with learning disabilities to have positive sexual relationships

People with learning disabilities want to love and be loved.

This is simply stating the obvious, and we shouldn’t need research to tell us this. However, the National Development Team for Inclusion (NDTi) has been working in partnership with My Life My Choice to explore exactly this topic. We have been researching this because self-advocates at My Life My Choice told us lack of support for sexual relationships for people with learning disabilities is an important issue that needs addressing.

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“Special or Unique”: A new report from Disability Rights UK and LKMco

Education ministers should boost the disability-specific elements of anti-bullying guidelines and personal, social and health education (PSHE), a new report urges today (2nd August 2019).

Based on focus groups with 12-14 year old children, the report suggests there is widespread ignorance of disability issues among schoolchildren, even those who have special educational needs or who are disabled (SEND).

Researchers found widespread frustration amongst SEND pupils in both mainstream and special schools at the failure of teachers and school leaders to deal with bullying and to promote inclusive classroom environments.

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