Job seeking, job keeping, and people’s attitudes when you have Cerebral Palsy

Job seeking, job keeping, and people’s attitudes when you have Cerebral Palsy

BDF Head of Policy’s speech to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cerebral Palsy, 9 November 2021

Angela Matthews, Head of Policy and Research, was invited to speak to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cerebral Palsy’s (APPG on CP) November 2021 meeting. She was asked to speak about people with Cerebral Palsy’s experiences of looking of work, being in work, and encountering other people’s at attitudes and behaviours.

In this short speech, Angela presents the experiences of people with CP alongside some of the advice cases she has been involved in related to people with CP accessing employment, particularly during the pandemic, and when people with CP encounter people’s perceptions of them at work and when accessing services.

Thank you to this APPG for inviting BDF to present to them, and thank you also to the employers and people with CP who shared their stories with Angela.

You can download a Word version of Angela’s speech at the right hand side of this page.

BDF submits evidence to the APPG on transitioning from childhood to adulthood with Cerebral Palsy, August 2022

The APPG invited BDF to submit two pages of evidence on the barriers people with CP experience when moving from childhood to adulthood. In our evidence, we explored three key themes:

• Lack of access to therapy services
• Poor access to appropriate assistive technologies
• The language we use in policy to discuss ‘transitions’ and how far this syncs with the reality of people’s life experiences.

You can download a plain Word version of our submission at the right hand side of this page.

“I have Cerebral Palsy and I sound like Stephen Hawking. Would someone employ me?”

(Job seeker with CP)

“It is not just people who tell people with CP they do not belong. It is untrained Access to Work advisers, it’s the technologies we procure without disability and accessibility specifications, and it’s rushed and outdated job design methods that lead to poorly written job descriptions and adverts.”

(Angela Matthews, Head of Policy and Research)