Another series of CSIE’s popular disability awareness workshops took place earlier this week, on Monday 14 December, for students in years 7, 8 and 9 in Whitcliffe Mount School in West Yorkshire. Five hour-long workshops were delivered, engaging groups of up to 25 students in each workshop, exploring disability from a range of perspectives.

Students engaged in lively conversations about the meaning of specific words and possible implications beyond literal definitions. They also heard from numerous disabled people, through video clips or short extracts of selected writings, and considered what disability is and how it arises, the difference between disability and impairment, and the relative importance of similarities and differences between people. Through various real life examples, students identified some common assumptions about disability and considered how disabled people do things differently. At the end of each workshop students were offered a chance to ask additional questions anonymously, to which CSIE has sent written responses

CSIE has developed these workshops in direct response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s recommendation that schools should do more to help pupils understand disabled people, the social model of disability and the prejudices disabled people face (“Out in the open”, EHRC, 2012). Our workshops have been consistently rated very highly by students and staff; feedback has once again been overwhelmingly positive. In each group up to 100% of participants (students and staff) said that they found the workshop helpful. Some did not respond and a couple who said that they found it unhelpful, said that it did not add to what they already knew. Some of the reasons students gave for finding the workshops helpful were:
“I now respect people with disabilities. I wasn’t bothered before but now I care.”
“I have learnt that even if you are disabled you can still do the same thing but in a different way.”
“I realised some disabilities don’t have an effect on a body.”
“I know things that I didn’t know about disability.”
“I am now able to see from another perspective.”
“It helped me understand more.”
“I have found out that just because you are disabled it doesn’t mean you can’t do stuff.”
“It helped me look at the concept of disability in a new way.”
“I feel like I know more about disabilities and how you shouldn’t marginalise someone because of it.”
“It made me realise that just because someone has a disability it does not mean they can’t be successful or anything and they are just like us.”