Campaigns – Hertfordshire PASS

Katie, Patrick and Andrew are all apprentices with Hertfordshire PASS and Workability.

Hertfordshire PASS is a charity that helps young disabled people to live independently with self directed support and employment. Workability was initially set up as a project of Hertfordshire PASS in 2006 to help young disabled people to be employed.

The focus used to be on work experience and work tasters, but now it’s on apprenticeships. It’s my job to find placements, places who will take the apprentices on. It’s Katie’s job to find the mentors and Andrew’s job to find the young people who will be the apprentices.

We are unique, there's no other places that are user lead in England. By user driven I mean it's run by disabled young people.

Simone is campaigns officer with ALLFIE. The Alliance for inclusive Education.

In 2009 the government published an Apprenticeships Bill. In there was the opportunity for all young people to have access to apprenticeships, including disabled young people. This looked like a great piece of legislation. We supported disabled young people accessing apprenticeships, however, there were major issues that we felt were really important and needed to be addressed.

One was the government wanted to introduce the requirement that all young people needed 5 GCSE’s in order to get an entitlement to an apprenticeship place. The Alliance thought this was discriminatory in the fact that many disabled young people will not have got 5 GCSE’s, because of the inaccessibility of the qualification system. Some young people may never ever be able to get 5 GCSE’s or be able to get the Maths and English as part of the 5 GCSE’s but that doesn’t stop them from being a fantastic apprentice.

When I found out that you needed 5 GCSE’s that was totally ludicrous in my view because 5 GCSE’s is difficult for anybody to understand and to get.

It didn't affect me as I already had 5 GCSE’s but I think all disabled people should be allowed to choose what they want to do in life.
I didn’t think it was fair.

It seemed to be that the 5 GCSE’s went back, right back in history where that was a sign of a good education. A standard that non disabled people should have achieved after compulsory education. It was not a standard that was expected to be a good apprentice or to be a good employee in the future. It’s really important to know that when we were doing our research the majority of employers were not looking for 5 GCSE’s, including Maths and English.

As part of the campaign to influence the proposed Apprenticeship Bill, Simone and ALLFIE invited Tony Young, then Minister for Apprenticeships to visit young apprentices Katie, Andrew and Patrick at work.

We also thought it was really important to give Lord Young the opportunity to actually see there were other ways that disabled young people can demonstrate their ability, other than getting qualifications. There are lots of different ways of being able to do that through demonstration of a data base, through putting together videos, putting together pictures and things like that as an alternative to getting 5 GCSE’s.

When we constructing the Apprenticeship Bill, we were thinking about the importance of making people aware that an apprenticeship was a good quality experience and that it had proper educational standards. That it had proper entry qualifications. So while we’re busy doing what we thought was right, generally, then suddenly an organisation like ALLFIE comes along and says well actually yeah we like the direction of travel, but we don’t think you understand the problems of people with disabilities. Why don’t you come and meet some of our young apprentices and I was only too happy to do that.

What impressed me about that meeting was two things. One was I developed in me as a person to talk to other people that were in power about my opinions. The second thing was that showing what I could do as an apprentice.

So when Lord Young told me that he had a grand daughter who had the same disability as me, that was quite encouraging. It meant that Lord Young did have a personal interest. Also when we talked to him about the requirements of the Apprenticeship Bill he did seem very sympathetic to the changes that we wanted to be put in place.

Lord Young said, as he went out the door, he was happy to help wherever he can. And I think that's what we needed, to know people in the right places.

Lord Young, what's been the benefit to you of meeting Simone, Andrew, Katie and Patrick?

I think the real value is that they’re able to say to you, look we’ll show you some practical examples of involving young people. They need some support but if you give them that support they will make a really valuable contribution. Not only to whatever employer they’re involved in but to themselves. For me it was about getting out of the office and not just theorising about it. Or talking to civil servants but actually hearing first hand about people who were having to deal with these problems and I think it did affect our attitude towards the bill, significantly.

What we thought was really important, is offering an alternative to what the government had proposed. One of the ways to do that was to ask government to consider that a portfolio of work as an alternative to the 5 GCSE’s, which young people could put together to demonstrate their ability it participate in an apprenticeship.

And that idea was successful?

Certainly was. We’re now on the National Apprenticeships Unit Advisory Committee. We are now the on the Regulations Committee that is going to help advise government on those regulations on how that portfolio is going to look like.

My job now is really to put pressure on the government to make sure that they honour what’s contained within that legislation.

Will you be using anything that you gained from our visit in the future?

Absolutely I will. You know I think without that visit I wouldn’t really have known about this scheme. I’ve known about other schemes but I wouldn’t have had any real on the ground experience of people actually participating in the scheme.

I’m very pleased to hear that there have been changes in the Bill and like the rest of us I’ll be looking forward to seeing how it works in practice now.

We’re now in a situation where there’s a lot of change being introduced. So I think it’s really important that I’ve got an organisation here that I can consult and get their opinion. So here we are, I’m in a totally different position now I’m a member of the opposition, but I still think we’ve got an opportunity to influence. In two ways really, one I think it’s about influencing, trying to influence this government’s policy which is maybe a bit of a challenge, but one that we’ve got to try and do that. And the other thing we need to think about is that the labour party itself will be thinking about its future policy and it is important that I think that organisations like ALLFIE and young people like Patrick, Andrew and Katie will be able to influence that policy as well.

What do you think you’ve learnt through working with Simone on this campaign?

Since ALLFIE are a much bigger organisation than we are and a campaigning organisation and an organisation with experience of lobbying government, we certainly learned how to do that from them. We hadn’t really done that before. They enabled us to have the dialogue with Lord Young in the first place. The original one, last year. Without them that wouldn’t have been possible.

I worked with Simone to get to be heard and to get people to hear me.

It’s really, really important when you’re doing campaigning that you work with other organisations who have similar views to yourself and because the more pressure that you can put on to ministers, the better. From my experience of campaigning it’s the more organisations, more people that campaign in lots of different ways, is when you really do get the best results possible.

What advice would you give other young people who want to campaign?

Don’t be scared of going out there. If you have an opinion or if you have an issue that you want to raise with somebody, or somebody in power like Lord Young, go up and tell them. Write letters. If you can’t write a letter just put it down on tape. Do a video letter. You know you could easily get somebody to help you and support you in what you’re doing.

Have the courage of your convictions and to act upon them. If we hadn’t had that then we wouldn’t have been able to meet Lord Young and to play a part in changing the Apprenticeships Bill in the first place.

My advice to young people is to think about what you feel strongly and passionate about and find an organisation of disabled people that are just as passionate about the issue and get stuck in!

I want thank ALLFIE for helping me out to learn all about campaigning and everything. So it’s really helped boost my potential as a person and it’s got me the confidence. Yeah, disabled people if they have the passions, well what’s to stop them from going out there and sharing those passions and their opinions. If they feel that they want to make a stand about their issues, that they should and their opinions should be heard. So thank you Simone and ALLFIE for it.