Research News
What we learned from our project about Accessibility Plans In 2018, we were given funding from the ‘Disability Research on Independent Living and Learning’ (DRILL) programme to lead a project that examined whether Accessibility Plans were effective in driving inclusive education in English secondary schools post Equality Act (EA) 2010. The EA (2010) and Children and Families Act (2014) made it compulsory for all education and training providers to develop and publish Accessibility Plans outlining how they intended to make their settings more accessible over the course of time.
news would often come as a surprise or be found out by chance. The professional participants admitted that in their schools, the delivery of information in alternative formats was inconsistent. Many talked about accessible documents only being provided if pupils or parents made specific requests, rather than as standard practice throughout school. Instead of assigning responsibility to their school, the majority of the professionals felt factors such as lack of funding and not enough uptake by pupils were more important reasons.
As the project researcher, Physical access I travelled across England All of the project participants conducting 12 focus groups, highlighted very similar five semi-structured interviews physical access barriers within and two sets of online their schools. These included questionnaires to glean people’s physical organisation of experiences and perspectives school buildings, an excessive about different topics based number of steps, broken lifts, on the three key areas that and inadequate provision of Accessibility Plans are legally accessible toilets. Some parents required to focus on:- information pointed out how their children’s delivery, physical access, and sensory issues, which were curriculum. Disabled young clearly causing anxiety, were people, parents of Disabled being totally unsupported and young people, and education misunderstood in their schools. professionals took part in the In the online questionnaire, one project, and made up three parent wrote: separate participant groups. ‘Too much distraction. Walls Quantitative data gathered & some windows are covered from various sources were also used to support the with text, photos, pictures, drawings, info. Desks field study. Here are some of our project findings. are filled with stationary pots. The acoustics in the Delivery of written information dining area are bad, making it extremely noisy at In our project, Disabled young participants generally lunch & break times.’ thought that the provision of accessible information For most parents, barriers were often amplified by was poor. Parents’ responses were more diverse. professionals’ inflexible attitudes when they needed The majority of parents reported that in the absence help with removing the obstacles. In relation to of adequate provision of accessible information, access, it was clear that Accessibility Plans did not they had no choice but to scour a school’s website always comply with legal requirements. hoping they had not missed news regarding school activities. Some said they had to ask staff or other parents repeatedly for the information; for others,
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