A report commissioned by the Public Sector Partnership Workstream to collate Mainstreaming Reports from 111 organisations found that the average employment rate for disabled people with only 2% with most organisations having a rate below 5%.
Additionally, the reports from these organisations indicated that a high level of staff (36%) have unknown or undeclared disabilities. Finally, the research highlighted that within the public sector in Scotland, there is no consistent and transparent methodology for monitoring disability within the public sector workforce. Whilst some bodies report fully and in detail, others do not report publicly at-all and a wide range of methodologies are used to establish the number of disabled employees.
The Achieving Equality in our Public Services project is a 12-month initiative aiming to tackle the barriers to employment in the public sector faced by disabled people and the challenges of retaining paid jobs.
The project is being delivered by ENABLE Scotland.
They are seconding an experienced, senior staff member into a role as a Change Leader within 2 public sector organisations, working part-time in both for a year.
The Change Leader will implement learning from existing best practice operations across the public sector within the employers. They’ll aim to achieve a 50% increase in the number of disabled people recruited and support a programme for retaining disabled staff.
Additionally, in order to ensure that the changes made are sustainable, they’ll be working with the employers to make substantial changes in the organisation’s culture and approach to inclusion, draw up a programme to support to sustain the improvements. They’ll publish their learning for distribution across all Scottish public sector organisations.
We aim to develop this as a fully costed project that will be offered to public sector agencies through the Centre of Excellence from Spring 2022. More details on the employers we are working with and the staff delivering the project will be added here soon.