Understanding and Promoting Access for People with Learning Difficulties

Seeing the Opportunities and Challenges of Risk

Jane Seale,Melanie Nind

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135210649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The issue of access is at the forefront of the practical challenges facing people with learning difficulties and people working with or supporting them. This engaging text brings together evidence, narratives and discussions that question and advance our understanding of the concept of access for people with learning difficulties. Seale and Nind draw on their expertise to analyse a wide range of situations, including access to public spaces, citizenship education, community participation, and employment.

Through a series of related chapters, key researchers in the field of inclusion and learning difficulties enrich the access debate by:

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• considering what kind of access people with learning difficulties want;

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• identifying effective practice in relation to facilitating and promoting access;

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• revealing the capability of people with learning difficulties to seek and achieve access to potentially exclusionary communities;

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• providing a space for a wide range of people to share access stories.

With contributions from a variety of stakeholders including people with learning difficulties, Understanding and Promoting Access for People with Learning Difficulties clarifies the concept of access without over-simplifying what is involved. Through rigorous critique, this book provides a unique rationale for a new multi-dimensional model of access and ways of promoting it.

Proposing a reconceptualisation of the risk associated with promoting access for people with learning difficulties, this book will be of immense interest to students, researchers and professionals involved in inclusion and disability issues.

Part 1
Introduction

Chapter 1
Access for people with learning difficulties

New rhetoric or meaningful concept?

Melanie Nind and Jane Seale

Introduction

In this introductory chapter we set the scene for what follows in the book by discussing the ways in which access is conceptualised in the policy and research literatures. We show how calls for access from policymakers and others are not always matched by understanding of what this means in practice or in theory. This can turn access into unachievable aspiration at best and empty rhetoric at worst. As it would be hard to argue that access is anything other than a ‘good thing’ there is a danger that it could become the meaningless buzzword that Thomas and O’Hanlon (2001: vii) argue inclusion has become; made into a cliché that allows people to ‘talk about inclusion (or access) without really thinking about what they mean’. Similarly, Benjamin (2002:310) discusses the ways in which the term ‘valuing diversity’ has been used to ‘lend a veneer of social justice and moral authority’ to other agendas. The potential for access to be used likewise is self-evident.

We go on to briefly outline some of the failures of access and what this means for people with learning difficulties. These failures are acutely felt and described throughout the book (see for instance, Drew Bradley et al on struggling to live free of others’ rules and Duncan Mitchell on failure to access health screening). Our intention here is to illustrate why better understanding of what we mean by access and how access can be promoted and achieved is fundamental to people’s lives. We show how and why getting hold of access as a concept is both difficult and necessary. This involves a discussion of the ways in which access overlaps with other key concepts (and equally with other bits of rhetoric). This leads us into our multidimensional model of access (Nind and Seale 2009) and a discussion of the complex, layered nature of access drawn from multi-perspective narratives. In doing all of the above the chapter fulfils some key purposes:

• it goes some way towards communicating the kind of work that researchers have already done on access;
• it demonstrates why access is a topic worth dwelling on at this juncture in time;
• it shares some of the findings from the ESRC-funded seminars series on Concepts of Access that inspired this book; and
• it prepares readers for what the book goes on to offer, so that the accounts of research and experience and the reflections on the nature of the challenge can be read in context.

Unpicking access

The issue of access is frequently recognised as being at the forefront of the practical challenges facing people with learning disabilities and the people working with or supporting them. Despite this, it has received little theoretical attention; access has been much less picked over by academics than inclusion or participation, much less pondered by philosophers than democracy, social justice or citizenship. Like inclusion, access has become part of the fabric of our talk about education and community, pervasive and often unquestioned. In contrast to inclusion, however, there is nothing like the plethora of papers debating what the word means, illustrating how it is interpreted differently by politicians, practitioners, disability theorists; it has not become ‘contested territory’ (Clough 2000). Thomas and Loxley (2007:1) argue that thinking about inclusion and inclusive education has ‘billow(ed) out’ into new terrains, sometimes so overused as to lose meaning, but also gaining in multiple meanings, concerns and discourses in its relatively short history. The term ‘access’ has not been on this scope of journey and it has acquired less baggage along its way; nonetheless it is used almost complacently at every turn.

There have been some attempts to unpick what is meant by access. This was one of our intentions when, back in 2004 we bid to ESRC for funds to run a seminar series. Our aim was ‘to advance, through inter-disciplinary debate, our shared theoretical framework and understanding of the concept of access for people with learning disabilities’ and our objectives were to:

• Bring together, in ongoing, focused discussion, people with learning disabilities, a range of practitioners including educators and health professionals, advocacy groups and rights campaigners, and new and experienced researchers.
• Engage in shared questioning of the concept of access. For example, access for what purpose? How do people with learning disabilities experience access? What is worth accessing? What kind of access do people with learning disabilities want? How can access be enabled and evaluated?
• Stimulate and enrich the debate about access for people with learning disabilities through input from presenters and participants working on access across a wide range of fields and disciplines.
• Enhance clarity around the concept of access for people with learning disabilities without oversimplifying what is involved.
• Foster the process of access through greater understanding.

We won the funding and the seminar series did indeed do something original and powerful in bringing together an interdisciplinary and diverse group of participants to break new ground in addressing the variety of ways in which access can be conceptualised and enabled for people with learning disabilities. We have shared some of the processes and findings of the seminar series elsewhere (Nind and Seale 2008; 2009), but in this book we enrich this by bringing together some of those diverse voices from the seminars on paper and by presenting further analysis.

Before going further we want to dwell a little more on why the concept of access needs unpicking in this way or indeed at all. Calls for access to primary healthcare, access to leisure, access to mainstream education and so on are familiar to us. Indeed access in these separate domains form the basis of separate polices and sometimes even separate struggles. But, while access has to be to something, we question whether this implies that access is different in each domain or whether we can identify something essentially the same across contexts that helps us to understand the phenomenon per se. Our starting point was that there is likely to be something about the essence of access that means that educators can learn from healthcare practitioners and vice versa about what access entails, requires, and leads from and to. Similarly, if people with learning difficulties ‘do’ access everyday across these domains we might see them as the real experts on what access means, although true access might happen so infrequently that what people with learning difficulties know best might be what access is not!

If we unpick the concept of access a little we can see the need for the unpicking. Talk of access captures elements of aspiration. ‘It’ (primary healthcare, leisure, mainstream education etc.) is out there, ‘other people’ have it and therefore people with learning difficulties must want it too. We owe much to normalization movements for this thinking. Access also captures elements of entitlement; not only must they want it but they should have it too. Disability rights movements have helped to enshrine the rights agenda in our worldview. Aspiration and entitlement lead us towards concepts of universal access, which Eng et al (1998) suggest has become some kind of gold standard; everything must be accessible to everyone. And then we get the rhetoric-reality gap and a void in understanding what we really mean by all this.

Shakespeare (2006:46) has recently been an unsettling voice in the social model of disability by critiquing the ‘notion of a barrier-free world’ in which ‘Universal Design can liberate all’. He provides examples for which access needs to be individualised and where compromises are reasonable and practical. Keen not to discount the interaction of impairment with social factors, he is one of the few people who dares to voice the idea that access to work, for example, is not feasible for all people with learning difficulties, notably those with profound impairments. Shakespeare (2006:45) reminds us that ‘architectural and communications barrier removal is often easier than the removal of social and economic barriers’ and that ‘progress on many of these latter issues has been much slower to achieve’. He also shows (building on Singer 1999) how addressing some barriers and making aspects of the social world accessible for people with autism begin to look rather like specialised, even segregated provision.

It is not surprising then that service-providers, politicians and campaign groups grapple both to visualise and achieve accessible provision. An example familiar to educationalists is the story of the National Curriculum in England and Wales. Government thinking in introducing the National Curriculum did not initially include pupils with learning difficulties, but in response to pressure from professional and voluntary organizations (Mittler 2000) there emerged a new discourse. Official publications and pronouncements began to give assurances about all children and to provide guidance on access to the National Curriculum for pupils with special needs. Questions were raised about what ‘access’ to the curriculum actually meant (Peter 1992) and about whether the access was to something worth having (Aird 2001). Nonetheless, teachers have adopted this language of access and guidance and various interpretations proliferate, often without clear conceptualisation of whether this access is about entitlement, participation or something different. In healthcare there has been a growing agenda of access to mainstream services (e.g. Department of Health 2001) but what this means in practice is equally complex (Hall et al 2006).

Policy and legislative change (e.g. Disability Discrimination Act 1995, Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001) has raised the profile of access issues for many services and institutions making it no longer an option to ignore them. It has energised debate about the quality of the access provided and about who has the power to provide it (see for example the Website Accessibility Initiative), but it has not brought with it answers to the multiple access questions. Sometimes the goal of access is specified without strategies to achieve it. Redley (2008:376), for example, argues this is the case in regard to access to election processes:

The 2001 White Paper Valuing People: A new strategy for learning disability in the 21st century (Department of Health 2001) included a specific commitment to supporting more adults with learning disabilities to vote. The White Paper did not, however, present figures describing the extent of their current participation in recent elections, nor did it make recommendations as to how more adults with learning disabilities might be supported to vote.

More often there has been a tendency for formal documents to present an oversimplified impression of what is involved in enhancing access. For example, the Electoral Commission for Scotland (2003, cited by Redley 2008) refers to improved physical access and an easy-read guide to voting as important in the goal of barrier-free elections. The Right to Vote Information Pack and Supporter Fact Sheet (Disability Rights Commission 2005) go further in providing information (easy to read with pictures) about registering to vote, casting a vote, and the legal position on helping others to vote but, argues Redley (2008), falls short of advising on the sensitive issue of judging capacity to understand.

With regard to education, following Part 4 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, every school must now have an accessibility plan and the guidance specifies that this plan must show how the school will improve accessibility for disabled pupils: how the school will improve the physical environment, make improvements in the provision of information and increase access to the curriculum. The impression given is of a straightforward task for which a staged process of steps is needed: barriers to access must be removed, technology and other resources used and access is facilitated. This, like much that is written about access, is based on a model taken from physical and sensory impairments in which basic adaptations make a huge difference.

Failure to access

We have argued that greater understanding of access is needed, but if more evidence is needed to support this argument it must surely come from the ongoing inability to make access happen. One example of important but largely unsuccessful access relates to education, employment and training, which is all the more significant because of the wide acceptance that this can in turn facilitate transition to adulthood for young people with learning difficulties and access to the life chances that flow from this transition (C...