For Autism Awareness Day, we’ve invited KCL Alumni, trainee solicitor and LGBT and disability advocate, Jonathan Andrews to feature as our guest blogger.
You can read more about Jonathan here and follow him on Twitter.
As an advocate for fair access to the workplace and equality of opportunity, I’m particularly keen to ensure that social mobility is treated as an integral part of any strategy; workplaces need to be open to talent from all backgrounds, as it’s only then that they can be sure they’re reaching out to the widest talent pool possible and not overlooking talented people. This applies to social background (such as the types of school or university attended) as it does for anything else.
More than that, it’s important to remember than nobody has just one identity – everyone has a gender, a race, a sexuality, a social background, etc. – and often these overlap. The majority of disabled people, for example, aren’t going to be from elite backgrounds, just as the majority of BME or LGBT people won’t – and if employers want to reach out to all talent from these groups, they need to consider people of all social backgrounds too. It’s not just a nice thing to do, but makes smart business sense.
Initiatives particularly focused on employment for a particular group – such as King’s Advance internships, which offer employment in leading firms to disabled students – can intersect into improving social mobility in this way. I also know of some fantastic initiatives which are focused on increasing employment among disabled people – particularly autistic people, where despite the majority having a strong determination to work, the rates in full-time paid work is just 16%.
One such project is the Autism Exchange, an innovative initiative on whose steering board I sit. It was developed through a partnership between Ambitious about Autism, the national charity for young autistic people, and the Civil Service. It offers paid quality work experience to young autistic people (aged 18-25) in a variety of sectors, including civil service departments (such as the DWP, the Treasury, the Department of Education and Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) and private sector firms such as Deutsche Bank; and autism awareness training to workplaces, allowing them to effectively understand how to create the conditions for interns to succeed during their placement. Feedback on the placement, and particularly on the skills of interns, has been very positive, with several subsequently being offered full-time roles.
On social mobility more widely, it’s also vital that people are able to see people from backgrounds like themselves making their way in different fields – “If you can see it, you can be it”, as an acquaintance of mine once said, and if there’s no one like you in a field – whether this is due to social background or anything else – it becomes that much harder to visualise yourself there. I’ve set up an alumni network at my old comprehensive Darrick Wood – and worked with national charity Future First who are aiming for an alumni network in every school – to help make this a reality.